MediaFile

Xerox’s Burns fires at Masters’ no-women policy

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns has some strong opinions on Augusta National Golf Club’s policy of not admitting women as members.

“It’s ridiculous, it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” said Burns at the Reuters Global Media and Technology Summit in New York on Thursday.

Burns was responding to a question about the controversy that erupted in April over whether the all-male club would invite IBM CEO Virginia Rometty, who is both Burns’ corporate acquaintance and competitor, to become its first female member. IBM, along with AT&T and Exxon Mobil, are the three major sponsors of the Masters golf tournament, and while the past four male CEOs of the technology company have been offered membership at Augusta, the same courtesy has not yet been extended to Rometty.

And while Rometty did attend the Masters, Burns said she wouldn’t even go to Augusta as a spectator if she was extended an invite to the esteemed golf tournament.

“The way I think about it is, the Masters can do what the hell they want,” Burns said. “If they want to actually have no women in the Masters, then women and right-minded men should make a choice about what the hell they want to do with the Masters. If they aren’t interested in having me there, why would I go?”

Burns did say, however, that she was speaking for herself and had no professional opinion about Rometty’s actions. Rometty herself had not commented publicly about the situation.

And it’s not like Xerox or Burns hate sports. Burns, an avid baseball fan, said her company is a proud sponsor of the Mets and United States Tennis Association, but doesn’t do “golf things.”

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns has some strong opinions on Augusta National Golf Club's policy of not admitting women as members. “It’s ridiculous, it’s just absolutely ridiculous,” said Burns at the Reuters Global Media and Technology Summit in New York on Thursday. Join Discussion

Kleiner Perkins and gender discrimination plaintiff wrangle over love poems episode

The “Book of Longing”: spiritual screed or salacious smut?

A 2006 tract of love poems by Sixties crooner Leonard Cohen, of all things, has emerged as a key point of contention in the high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit that’s sent Silicon Valley into a tizzy.

When Ellen Pao, a junior partner at vaunted venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers sued the firm last month, one of the juicier nuggets tucked in the complaint described senior partner Randy Komisar’s alleged overtures: On Valentine’s Day in 2007, the suit alleged, Komisar gave Pao a copy of the “Book of Longing” — featuring “many sexual drawings and poems with strong sexual content” – and proceeded to ask her out to dinner while his wife was out of town.

On Wednesday, the VC firm hit back in a 7-page response (attached below) with an age-old defense: Pao took it the wrong way.

Komisar only gave Pao the Book of Longing after she gave him a book and a Buddha statue as holiday gifts following discussions the two had about Buddhism, Kleiner argued. The firm also said the book was purchased for Pao by Komisar’s wife.

In fact, the company leaped to the book’s defense, claiming there’s nothing inappropriate about it at all — especially given its reception from within, well, polite circles:

“Komisar, a practicing Buddhist, gave Plaintiff a book of poetry written by Leonard Cohen during Cohen’s five-year stay at a Zen monastery. That book was reviewed by the New York Times as “profound” and having “exceptional range”, and was set to music by famed composer Philip Glass, including performances at Stanford University and the Lincoln Center.”

A 2006 tract of love poems by Sixties crooner Leonard Cohen, of all things, has emerged to be a key point of contention in the high-profile sexual harrassment lawsuit that's sent Silicon Valley into a right tizzy. Join Discussion

Apple, Google and the price of world domination

In his first appearance at the World Wide Developer’s Conference as spiritual leader of the Apple faithful, CEO Tim Cook made it clear that he intends to not just further Steve Job’s vision but expand upon it. It’s never been more clear that Apple is intent on world domination.

Conspiracy theory? No. Try inescapable conclusion.

What else are we to make of Apple removing Google Maps from the iPhone? Google Maps was a core feature on the very first iPhone, but it will disappear in an iOS software update announced Monday at Apple’s developer conference.

Apple’s tension with Google is legendary. They began as friendly neighbors in largely complementary businesses – former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was even on Apple’s board. But after the introduction of the Android, Steve Jobs’s anger at Google’s entry into the mobile phone business was palpable.

Now Apple is kicking Google out, creating its own “Earth”-like maps and Android-like turn-by-turn navigation. If executed properly, Siri voice command in the iOS 6 update will work like OnStar. You’ll have the ability to be interactive and spontaneous while navigating, asking where the nearest Starbucks is. This is leaps and bounds beyond verbal turn-by-turn instructions and so disruptive to stand-alone in-dash GPS units that some are predicting that it’s game over, smartphones win again – and Apple is setting the pace.

This is how it begins. Making an ally into a competitor; incorporating great ideas from small players and leaving the small guys out of luck (lock-screen message centers, home-screen backgrounds, personal hotspots – these are all borrowed from the underground developer community). These are the signs of an emerging bully regime. Leveraging the advantage of an unlevel playing field is pretty much the big criticism of the Microsoft of yesteryear.

Now that Apple has announced it's kicking Google Maps off the iPhone, it's never been clearer that Apple is intent on utter domination. Join Discussion

PayPal eyes TV shopping with Comcast, Tivo

PayPal, eBay’s online payments business, is online, heading offline and hopes to be on your TV soon.

PayPal announced partnerships with Comcast and Tivo on Tuesday that aim to get viewers shopping during commercial breaks, pauses and at the end of shows. The projects are in development stages right now, but the goal is to have the services up and running later this year.

“The living room, in particular the TV set and the DVR, is the last leg of the stool,” said Scott Dunlap, vice president of emerging opportunities at PayPal.

The Comcast partnership is developing small banner ads that will pop up near the bottom of the TV screen that will let viewers use their PayPal accounts to donate to a non-profit, contribute to a political campaign or get coupons for discounts at retailers.

When viewers click on the ads, they will be prompted to log in to their PayPal accounts to complete the transactions. In the case of the retailer coupon, the discount will be automatically dropped into users’ PayPal accounts and taken off their next purchase, Dunlap explained.

Tivo users will see interactive ads that pop up when they pause a recorded show or finish watching a show. The ads will highlight products that viewers will be able to buy with PayPal and have the items shipped to the address associated with their PayPal accounts.  

While TV shopping is a new initiative for PayPal, eBay has already dipped its toe into this area. Last year, the company launched a “Watch With eBay” feature on the eBay for iPad app that lets viewers browse and buy items related to the TV shows they are watching.

PayPal partnerships follow roll out of "Watch with eBay" TV shopping technology. Join Discussion

Charleston Police to use data mining to fight crime

It’s not quite Minority Report but the Charleston Police Department in South Carolina aims to predict and prevent crimes from happening with the help of IBM’s data analytics tools.

To start the CPD wants to focus on reducing the number of burglaries in Charleston which it says often happen at similar times of day and in similar locations.

“The individuals committing these crimes tend to have predictable patterns, and incidents usually take place near their homes or familiar locations. In addition, property crimes are not displaceable crimes, which means the criminals won’t simply move two miles to another location’” the CDP said.

IBM’s predictive analytivcs software aims to uncover hidden patterns and insights from structured and unstructured data to pinpint where and when a crime would be committed. It also promises that its models will help anticipate threats, identify suspicious actors and effectivley allocate resources. Eventually the Charleston police wants to use IBM’s software to localize what it calls criminal hotspots and deploy police officers accordingly to prevent crimes befor they occur.

Charleston has more than 400 police officers who work on evaluating and forecasting crime patterns. It joins cities such as New York, Rochester, Las Vegas, Memphis, Los Angeles, Vancouver or Richmonf that use IBM software to fight crime.

IBM can point to some successes: Richmond, Virginia, which in 2005 was ranked the fifth most dangerous city in the United States dropped to the 99th spot after it began using IBM’s data mining technology to reduce crime.

“Historically, police agencies focused on protecting the community by solving crimes quickly to serve as a deterrent to would-be criminals,” Mark Cleverley, IBM global director of Public Safety solutions said.

It's not quite Minority Report but the Charleston Police Department in South Carolina aims to predict and prevent crimes from happening with the help of IBM's data analytics tools. Join Discussion

Intel’s facial-recognition freaks out potential customers

Mine and Yinka Adegoke’s story today on Intel’s proposal to use facial-recognition technology with a virtual TV service and set-top box has raised legitimate concerns about allowing Big Brother into consumers’ living rooms.

People’s reluctance to have a camera keep tabs on who is sitting in front of their TV may be a hurdle that Intel has underestimated as it struggles to convince media content providers to hand over their shows.

When I bought a Kinect for my Xbox last year, I felt paranoid for at least a couple of weeks every time I sat down on my sofa in front of my TV. Each time I turn on my Xbox, a camera — connected to Microsoft and the Internet — sees everything I do.

Microsoft doesn’t currently use the Kinect to track who is watching TV in my house, but it has also discussed this possibility with programmers and it might come one day.

For now, I’ve gotten used to Kinect looking at me, just like most people have become accustomed to Google tracking what they do on the web.

Intel is not the only company that wants to use facial recognition to target ads — whether on signs in shopping malls, as in the movie Minority Report, or in the home, so discussion about this issue may only just getting started.

Here are a handful of tweets and comments from Reuters.com on giving up privacy through Intel’s planned TV service:

Our story today on Intel's proposal to use facial-recognition technology with a virtual TV service and set-top box has raised legitimate concerns about allowing Big Brother into consumers' living rooms. Join Discussion

Facebook’s private experiment with democracy

Facebook is having a vote on changes to its privacy policy. Not that you’d know it.

Voter turnout has always been a problem for developed nations, but what about developed social networks? Facebook, with its 900 million users, is often written about as if it were the personal prelature of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. But Facebook itself prefers the term “ecosystem” – with good reason. Facebook’s engineers provide the basic conditions for life – the agar at the bottom of the social-media Petri dish. In turn, it’s developers and users who really craft their own worlds, their own experiences of Facebook – not Facebook itself. And whatever world they craft, it can only exist in the laws that govern the Facebook universe. Who ultimately decides those laws? Facebook.

Given that reality, it’s amazing that most users don’t care a lick about the vote happening on the site, right now, today, over proposed changes to Facebook’s privacy policies. Nor did they care much about the last vote over the site’s Terms of Service, which happened in 2009. Of course, it’s hard to care about something you don’t know is happening. Even though the vote is making the news here and there, there’s no inkling of any promotion on Facebook itself about what sounds like a rather important site event.

Go ahead and take a look. Log into your Facebook page and check for any kind of banner alerting you to the fact that a vote over two policies – the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Data Use Policy – is under way until Friday June 8, 9 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time. You won’t find it. Nor will you likely find the Facebook Site Governance page, because, if you’re like me, despite the page garnering 2.1 million likes, only three of my several hundred friends have found it, and I clearly missed those particular updates whenever they scrolled across my feed.

What’s worse, even if you find these pages, as I did, and manage to vote on them, your vote will likely count for nothing. Facebook has reserved the right to keep the results of the vote as “advisory” unless 30 percent of its active userbase actually fills out the ballot. So, unless 230 million of us bother to read these documents and vote on them, Facebook will do whatever it wants, anyway, likely adopting the documents as proposed. (If you’re wondering, there’s little new material in them. Mostly they’re housekeeping changes making the documents a bit clearer in defining terms – as best I can tell, anyway. They are quite long and dry.)

The vote helps Facebook, long dogged by complaints about arbitrary changes to its privacy rules, claim it’s incorporating its users in its decisions. But what kind of vote is this, really? Small-time and provisionary. Instead of getting to vote on something like a Declaration of War, they’re rubber-stamping the name of a new Post Office. And only if a few hundred million of them show up to hold the stamp.

The details of Facebook’s Constitution, its radical claims about its right to share your personal information, were made unimpeachable a long time ago, and carved in stone in Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO letter. A mass mobilization against Facebook’s proposed changes wouldn’t roll back Facebook’s policies; it would just force the company to revert to a slightly less clear version of them. And though Facebook representatives told Techcrunch the user threshold came from a quaint time, 2009, when the site was much smaller, they apparently didn’t bother to examine how the voting procedure would scale ahead of this current, ahem, election cycle.

Facebook is having a vote on changes to its privacy policy. Not that you'd know it. Join Discussion

Mary Meeker breaks her investment fast

Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has finally found a company that meets her standards. Just days after saying she spent the first quarter turning down overpriced investments, her fund is investing $15 million in Lending Club.

Meeker, who leads Kleiner’s $1 billion Digital Growth Fund, told the All Things D conference last week that private-market valuations were high and she and her colleagues “just were having trouble getting comfortable.”

Lending Club is a service that matches people who want personal loans with others who would like to make them. Meeker is taking a seat on its board. John Mack, chairman emeritus of Morgan Stanley, where Meeker worked as an Internet analyst before joining Kleiner in 2010, is also investing $2.5 million.

Consumer lending is hot among venture capitalists, with venture-backed companies such as Prosper filling similar niches to Lending Club. Businesses such as Wonga and ZestCash are springing up in the lower tiers.

Including the latest investment, Lending Club has raised a total of $100 million from investors including Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. It said it is adding a total of $135 million each quarter in new loans.

Just days after saying she spent the first quarter turning down overpriced investments, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has finally found a company that meets her standards: Lending Club. Join Discussion

Betwixt and between: Facebook’s act of desperation

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is considering lowering the minimum membership age to include tweens. It raised eyebrows and kindled a new discussion about privacy and the propriety of inviting youngsters into what the company aspires to make the world’s biggest salesroom.

But I have a different concern: Soliciting children would be pretty strong evidence that Facebook needs a big boost to its already staggering 900 million membership to justify its valuation and business model. Having courted every early, middle and late adopter possible, there isn’t much low-hanging fruit for Facebook anymore. But courting tweens would inevitably invite scrutiny and regulation, since the prospect of cyberstalking is even more toxic that cyberbullying.

In other words, the potential rule change looks like an act of desperation. Coming off a miserable stock market debut, both the merits and atmospherics of this notion are decidedly bad.

It’s easy to see why this would be on the table. Facebook has to prove that it can sell things on a massive scale, that it is the 21st century’s answer to television. All of that seemed possible before it went public on May 18, as the company’s valuation was pushed up steadily for months in thin trade on private exchanges among well-heeled insiders. But the question of just how good an advertising medium Facebook can be has been pressed by a steady decline in its share price during 12 days of trading – to about 60 percent of its historical high. Until Facebook can prove its business model, it’s a good idea to keep bulking up so that a leveling off of membership, or even a decline, doesn’t turn the story really ugly.

For Facebook greater, and growing, numbers are essential. Like panning for gold, you need a lot of water to come up with a few grains. So to achieve gold-rush growth, Facebook has to mine the young end of the spectrum.

That’s partly because there isn’t much else to mine. The size of Facebook’s user base is mature – and the fastest growing demographic is already of the mature: middle-aged people and above account for 46 percent of the membership. Age 24 and younger are a mere 14 percent. The youngest age group is ripe for the picking, but the risks are high: It is most vulnerable, immature and incapable of coping with the sort of challenges even adults have trouble dealing with on social networks. So why ask for a world of hurt – unless you have to?

Facebook has flirted with the idea for a while, of course. The Journal reminds us that CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself floated the idea a year ago: “That will be a fight we take on at some point,” he told Fortune in May 2011.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is considering lowering the minimum membership age to include tweens. It's a cry for help – evidence that Facebook is scrambling to justify its huge valuation. Join Discussion

Wal-Mart’s annual meeting and the case of the missing Taylor Swift livestream

Taylor Swift, country music’s current sweetheart, performed at the Wal-Mart annual meeting Friday. But her record label doesn’t really want you to know that. Or at the very least, they didn’t want you to see or hear her.

Neither side is saying why, but is this a good time to mention the Mexican bribery allegations swirling around Wal-Mart?

Wal-Mart typically brings in top acts for its annual meeting, which is as much a pep rally for its employees as an exercise in corporate governance. Ben Stiller and Will Smith have served as hosts in the past, and this year’s MC duties went to none other than Justin Timberlake. In addition to JT and Swift,  other musical acts who showed up to serenade Wal-Mart workers Friday included Celine Dion, Lionel Richie, Juanes and the Zac Brown Band.

But while the performances of all those other acts were streamed on the webcast of the meeting, Swift’s mysteriously wasn’t.  When it was time for her to stop bantering with Timberlake and start singing “Love Story” and “Mean,” the webcast was interrupted with a notice that said the performance would not be shown at the request of her label, Big Machine Music. That is somewhat ironic, as Swift’s core audience consists of young digital natives while Dion and Richie fans may need Swift’s fans to  explain what a webcast is to them.

Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar gave no other details about the Swift blackout, but noted that a few acts have requested the same in the past, Jennifer Lopez among them. A spokeswoman for Swift’s label, Big Machine Music, could not immediately say why the performance was blacked out.

Perhaps Wal-Mart and Swift’s handlers couldn’t come to terms on a licensing fee, though that seems a stretch given Wal-Mart’s deep coffers. Perhaps Swift’s team felt streaming her performance might eat into her single and album sales. But that too seems highly unlikely since Swift has blossomed over her short career into one of the music industry’s most reliable sales performers, moving more than 22 million albums and 50 million song downloads from her catalog.

But maybe, just maybe—and again, we’re just spit-balling here—Swift’s team didn’t want her squeaky clean image forever digitally linked to a company the New York Times says bribed its way into rapid expansion in Mexico, only to see top management squelch an internal investigation. Now the Feds are investigating in the U.S. and various officials in Mexico are probing, too.

Taylor Swift, country music’s current sweetheart, performed at the Wal-Mart annual meeting Friday. But her record label doesn't really want you to know that. Or at the very least, they didn't want you to see or hear her. Join Discussion