There’s a good reason that Microsoft’s recent anti-Google efforts — including a recent admonition not to get “scroogled” by Google Shopping — feel like political attack ads: the team behind them is led by former pollster and longtime campaign advisor Mark Penn. Penn, who worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, joined Microsoft in mid-2012 as a senior vice president for “strategic and special projects.” The New York Times has profiled Penn, who came to Microsoft as the company was starting one of its most aggressive publicity pushes in recent years. “If any of our competitors say things about us that we don’t think are true, we’re not going to sit on the sidelines,” says Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw….
Micron Technology is adding Mike Rayfield as the brains to its newly-doubled manufacturing brawn. NVIDIA’s departing mobile chief was instrumental in producing Tegra 3, the hardware behind flagship devices like HTC’s One X and Google’s Nexus 7. He’s been given the slightly misleading job title as VP of the company’s Wireless Solutions Group, which, despite the name, produces DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash memory for the global smartphone market — and given his track record, it’s likely that we’ll be seeing much more of Micron’s memory in the years to come
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Filed under: Cellphones
Former NVIDIA mobile chief Mike Rayfield lands at Micron Technology originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At a J.P Morgan conference held in Boston on Wednesday, Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was looking up and, more importantly, customers who cancelled the service because of the Qwikster rebranding, plan repricing, and subsequent poor PR are now returning.
The company drove users away due to a considerable price hike on its cheapest disk plan – from $ 9.99 to $ 15.98 – as well as its ham-handed decision to split the company into a streaming arm – Netflix – and a disk-in-the-mail arm – Qwikster. Wells said:
We think there’s room to grow, but the improvements in retention and our growth in Q1 and Q2 since Q3 and Q4 of last year make us feel pretty good. Rejoined or folks rejoining the service still remain about a third of our new subscribers that are coming in.Even streaming-only subscriptions, who should not have faced an impact, reacted to last year. We think that’s a result of the negative PR, the swirl that was around the brand and the company will dissipate over time. We even saw that in Canada, which you could argue should not have seen it.Netflix pricing is currently set at $ 7.99 a month for one DVD (not Blu-Ray) disk out at a time a month and $ 16 for unlimited streaming and one disk. The steady return of disgruntled customers is a testament to the breadth of Netflix’s streaming selection and general economic improvements.
At a J.P Morgan conference held in Boston on Wednesday, Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was looking up and, more importantly, customers who cancelled the service because of the Qwikster rebranding, plan repricing, and subsequent poor PR are now returning.
The company drove users away due to a considerable price hike on its cheapest disk plan – from $ 9.99 to $ 15.98 – as well as its ham-handed decision to split the company into a streaming arm – Netflix – and a disk-in-the-mail arm – Qwikster. Wells said:
We think there’s room to grow, but the improvements in retention and our growth in Q1 and Q2 since Q3 and Q4 of last year make us feel pretty good. Rejoined or folks rejoining the service still remain about a third of our new subscribers that are coming in.Even streaming-only subscriptions, who should not have faced an impact, reacted to last year. We think that’s a result of the negative PR, the swirl that was around the brand and the company will dissipate over time. We even saw that in Canada, which you could argue should not have seen it.Netflix pricing is currently set at $ 7.99 a month for one DVD (not Blu-Ray) disk out at a time a month and $ 16 for unlimited streaming and one disk. The steady return of disgruntled customers is a testament to the breadth of Netflix’s streaming selection and general economic improvements.
Microsoft’s first Zune hardware launched in late 2006, around five years after the initial Apple iPod hit the market and less than a year before the iPhone changed the smartphone industry. Former Microsoft executive Robbie Bach, in charge of Zune at the time, says he would skip portable media players if he could launch Zune again. “The portable music market is gone and it was already leaving when we started,” admitted Bach at an entrepreneurs’ event in Seattle last week. “We just weren’t brave enough,” he says, accepting that Microsoft ended up chasing Apple without a compelling reason for consumers to purchase Zune hardware.
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Google Glass isn’t the only game in town.
Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, just raised $ 7.6 million in a round co-led by Founders Fund. The other notable firm in the deal isn’t disclosed, but we hear through a source that it’s Khosla Ventures.
Misfit isn’t saying too much about what it’s working on, except to say that the next generation of wearable devices shouldn’t compete with fashion, has to be ambient and has to have functions outside of sensing. It has to be the kind of thing a consumer wouldn’t need to remember to wear and ideally, it would be something that’s so critical that a person would go back home if they left it there.
“Wearables from the 1.0 era make people look like Iron Man,” said chief executive Sonny Vu.
The name of the company has a super-interesting backstory. Up until last fall, Vu, Sculley and his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar, were tossing around some pretty lackluster name ideas like Etherware. He, Iyengar and Sculley were sitting around at a table at the Rosewood on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, having trouble deciding when news flashed that Steve Jobs had passed away.
“It was a real shame we never got them together after John’s departure from Apple, so we decided to name the company in honor of Steve,” Vu said.
The name Misfit Wearables is inspired by the opening line in the famous 1997 Apple commercial that launched the “Think Different” slogan: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”
The other thing that’s notable about the company is the team. Vu and Iyengar co-founded Agamatrix. It isn’t a household name in Silicon Valley, but it made the first medical device add-on that Apple approved for the iPhone. It’s a glucose meter that diabetes patients use to test their blood sugar levels regularly.
Over 10 years, Vu and Iyengar built it into a business that makes between $ 50 and 100 million per year through the sale of glucose test strips. The two of them started tinkering with glucose sensing technology, and found a way that was twice as accurate as the leading technology on the market purely through better math. Vu said since most research and development teams working on glucose sensing were led by biologists, his team could fix inefficiencies that experts from other disciplines couldn’t see. When Agamatrix originally entered the market, there were more than 30 competing products. Yet they managed to gain a foothold.
Then when the iPhone came out, they dreamed up a new concept: a glucose meter that would upload and track a patient’s blood sugar levels through an app. It took nine months of back-and-forth with Apple to get approved it for the iPhone. It also took a few years for them to get insurance companies and Medicare to cover the cost of glucose meters for diabetes patients. The FDA cleared it last December and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis now markets it under the name iBG Star.
So for all of you who might complain about how hard it is start a mobile or Facebook app company, this was crazy hard!
Vu says he’s using the new round of funding to grow his team. He’s relocating to San Francisco from Boston where he’ll build a hardware and industrial design team locally. Then, interestingly enough, Misfit’s software team is located in Vietnam, because Vu found some world-class machine learning experts there that were trained in good U.S. technical Ph.D. programs like the one at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. (Honestly, this isn’t so crazy though. I run into companies every week that have serious development studios in Eastern Europe, Pakistan and East Asia.)
“We’re doing algorithms (machine learning) and app development in Vietnam because of speed, not just cost,” Vu said. “There’s lots of this kind of talent in Silicon Valley but they’re just not readily available, at least not to newcomers like us.”
Watch out, Honeywell. Nest Labs is serious. The Palo Alto start-up previously stated that it has the resources to defend itself, which is clearly the case. Just today the company filed Answer and Counterclaims in Honeywell’s patent infringement suit against the upstart thermostat company. Nest Labs flat-out denies infringement claims and validity of the seven patents listed by Honeywell.
A press released issued today calls the complaint “meritless allegations.” It goes on to quote its new vice president and general counsel, Richard “Chip” Lutton, Jr., who was Apple’s former chief intellectual property office, “Instead of filing lawsuits, Honeywell should use its wealth and resources to bring innovative products to market. Nest will defend itself vigorously in court and we’ll keep our company’s focus where it should be – on developing and delivering great products for our customers.” Grab some popcorn, folks. This is going to get good.
During his 10 year stint at Apple, Lutton worked with Nest Labs founder and CEO, Tony Fadell. The two likely worked closely as Tony Fadell led the iPod development team for 18 generations and the first several iPhone dev teams. As Apple’s chief patent counsel Lutton was involved in all aspects of Apple’s patent development, acquisition, licensing, enforcement, and dispute. So yeah, Nest Labs hired a big gun.
“I’ve worked with Tony for more than a decade – first at Apple and more recently as an advisor to Nest,” said Lutton in a released statement today. “What he and the Nest team have built is incredibly inspiring – the company has been disruptive from Day One and has no plans to slow down. I’m excited to help Nest drive and defend its innovative products and business culture.”
Nest Labs is essentially fighting the establishment. In today’s Answers and Counterclaims, Nest Labs labors on how the Nest Learning Thermostat product threatens the “blah-looking controller”, a controller that most often happens to be made by Honeywell. Nest Labs also refutes claims that its product uses Honeywell’s patents. But even if they did, Nest Labs insists said patents would be invalid as they’re retreads of older, expired patents or, not even worthy of a patent as in the case of Honeywell’s ’504 patent referring to a controller using “complete grammatical sentences”. As the document later points out, some of Honeywell’s older patents are invalid on the grounds that even older patent applications were abandoned when prior art was discovered.
It’s hard to say if Honeywell knew that Nest Labs would respond with such vigor. Start-ups often tend to roll-over and settle, content with pivoting rather than fighting. But not Nest Labs. They’re fighting to keep selling their clearly disruptive learning thermostat.
It’s a sin I know almost too well as a blogger. It’s slow going for news on a Friday night and the pageview gods send you a reprieve in the form of a tweet.
A former Apple engineer is berating the company’s design ethic in the post-Jobs era in less than 140 characters?
Score! Suddenly one story becomes another story then another story then another story then another story.
Until it’s a crisis! ZOMG! Apple is over! The company is finished!
Interested in the actual story, I talked with former Apple TV engineer Mike Margolis about the tweet that launched a thousand blog posts.
So here’s what he said on Twitter.
@aral Fun fact – those new designs were tossed out 5 years ago because SJ didn’t like them. Now there is nobody to say “no” to bad design.
— Michael Margolis ッ (@yipe) March 24, 2012
Here are his thoughts with far more context:
I woke up this morning with hundreds of new followers on Twitter and two dozen text messages from friends – many of them Apple employees past and present. Turns out a few of my tweets were being blogged about. I wouldn’t mind, except many people were misquoting and painting doom and gloom scenarios for Apple and making false claims about the design teams at Apple. I have not been present for any of the Apple TV product discussions for more than four years, so I’m a bit surprised that everyone is all atwitter about what SJ rejected so long ago and what that means today.
Specifically, I stated in a tweet that Steve did not like the grid design five years ago. That is absolutely 100% true. It’s also true that five years ago the iPad didn’t exist, Apple users weren’t in love with app-grid interfaces like they are now, a streaming-only iCloud connected device was a pipe dream, and AppleTV did not have great new third party content like YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, NBA, NFL, and more. The UI didn’t make much sense back then but it makes much more sense now. If you compare Front Row to AppleTV 1.0, ”AppleTV Take 2″, and the new AppleTV UI it is clear that the product is continually improving. The new UI is no doubt cleaner, simpler, easier to use, and more in line with the now-popular iPad UI and Lion’s Launchpad.
Timing and context are crucial – both on Twitter and in product design.
Steve rejecting a design five years ago isn’t a huge deal. Steve was well known for rejecting ideas, tweaking them, and turning them into something even better. And that’s a very good thing. One of my favorite parts of working at Apple was knowing that SJ said “no” to most everything initially, even if he later came to like it, advocate for it, and eventually proudly present it on stage. This helped the company stay focused and drove people to constantly improve, iterate, and turn the proverbial knob to 11 on everything.
A quick clarification: many sites are now worried that there is only a single designer in the consumer apps team. That is absolutely not true. I simply stated (in 140 characters) that one designer from the consumer apps team was largely responsible for the Apple TV visual design, not Jonathan Ive.
Margolis adds that he no longer owns any Apple stock and hasn’t been employed by the company since 2008.
Former Sony Worldwide Studios head Phil Harrison will serve as the new head of Microsoft’s European Game Studios, according to a report from GamesIndustry International. We have confirmed the report with our own source familiar with the situation. A similar leadership role with the company was recently vacated by Peter Molyneux, who left his role as Creative Director at Microsoft’s European Game Studios to join the indie start-up venture 22 Cans.
Harrison served as executive vice president for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe before leaving to work at Infogrames in 2008, Atari in 2009, and at David Perry’s cloud gaming company Gaikai in 2010, where Harrison served on the advisory board. Even casual followers of the games industry will…
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Last week, OnStar made some changes to its terms of service which were almost universally recognized as being overreaching and unnecessary. The two primary changes were, first, that OnStar would continue to track subscribers who had terminated their service. They could ask to have their data connection severed in addition to unsubscribing, but why should they have to? Second, OnStar gave itself the ability to share or sell anonymized driving data to “any third party,” “for any purpose, at any time.”
Faced with a flurry of criticism from users, sites like this one, and even Congress, OnStar has gone back on at least one of the changes.
They relate the update in a brief press release:
OnStar announced today it is reversing its proposed Terms and Conditions policy changes and will not keep a data connection to customers’ vehicles after the OnStar service is canceled.
If OnStar ever offers the option of a data connection after cancellation, it would only be when a customer opted-in, Marshall said. And then OnStar would honor customers’ preferences about how data from that connection is treated.
Kudos to them for quickly responding to pressure from their user base, but the tracking after cancellation was only part of the trouble. Their self-awarded ability to anonymize to their own satisfaction and then share with literally anybody they want to seems to be intact, and there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism for OnStar to even ask customers whether they want their information shared for marketing purposes. If you want to use the service, this is something you’ll have to agree to. Whether that’s a good trade-off is up to you.
