By Gilbert Falso :: 7:51 PM
Joe Kennedy, Pandora’s CEO, President and Chairman has resigned from the company.
He made his resignation announcement during Pandora’s quarterly earnings call earlier today. The board of directors will form a search committee to find a successor, but Kennedy will remain in his current role until his replacement is selected.
Although Pandora’s financial numbers are decent – in fiscal year 2013, the company totaled $427.1 million in revenue and $255.9 million in mobile revenue, with $125.1 million in revenue for the most recent quarter that ended on January 31 – they’re not strong enough to make the company profitable.
Pandora had an IPO in 2011, and had opened at $16 per share and the stock then jumped into the $20s, but has since been lower, just into the double-digits as they try hard to turn a profit. Recently, they made an unpopular announcement with their users that they would be cutting mobile listeners off after 40 hours of music play each month.
By Paul Thomson :: 7:27 PM
Microsoft was fined by European Union antitrust regulators earlier this week for not complying with orders to include an Internet browser selection screen on new PCs shipped in the EU.
The fine was steep – $730 million. But the interesting part of this case is that it looks like regulators were tipped off to Microsoft’s non-compliance by Google and Opera. A report published by the Financial Times confirms that Google ratted out Microsoft.
Why would Google point out Microsoft’s transgressions? Many point to Microsoft’s recent advertising campaign, “Scroogled,†which didn’t paint Google in the best light. The initiative attempted to freak consumers out and move them to Bing search and Outlook e-mail by pointing out that Google scans e-mail contents to determine advertising placement – it may have been all the prompting that Google needed to deal with Microsoft.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 7:19 AM
Rovi , the digital home-entertainment company, has resolved its ongoing legal battles with Hulu and entered into a licensing agreement the company, according to statements released by both yesterday.
Although terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, both parties consider the legal troubles to be resolved.
Rovi had originally sued Hulu in 2011 in federal court over alleged infringement of patents that covered interactive television functionality. Rovi had that Hulu was wrongly using their technology for Hulu’s electronic programming guides.
By Gilbert Falso :: 10:54 PM
The Mars rover Curiosity, recently the victim of some onboard computer glitches, has been placed into a standby mode as a solar storm heads towards the red planet.
NASA has shut down Curiosity as a precaution against intense solar radiation traveling through space. Scientists noticed a solar flare erupting from the sun that sent a stream of radiation toward Mars. The flare also touched off a cloud of superheated gases that headed toward the planet at speeds approaching 2 million miles per hour.
After the danger of the solar flare has passed, scientists will wake the rover up, and continue rebooting the onboard computers to recover from the earlier bugs the rover has encountered.
By Paul Thomson :: 6:33 PM
Facebook today announced that they have appointed Susan Desmond-Hellman, Chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco to their board of directors.
“I’ve always been drawn to organizations that do ground-breaking work,” she said in a statement released by Facebook earlier today.
Desmond-Hellman is a former doctor and biotech expert who spent the early portion of her career as scientist and executive at Genentech before she was tapped to run UCSF in 2009.
Her appointment makes her the second woman on Facebook’s board. The company has received criticism in the past for its low number of women board members. The addition of Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the board last year marked the first female seat. Desmond-Hellman’s appointment brings the total board membership at Facebook to nine.
In addition to the Facebook board, Desmond-Hellmann also serves on the board of Procter and Gamble, and in 2009, she joined the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council for a three-year term. In 2008, she was appointed to the California Academy of Sciences board of trustees and the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation’s board of directors.