DanielRoth.net

Oracle's Lost Revolution

2009-12-16T12:18:00-05:00

Everything is failing all the time; it’s just a matter of how quickly and how devastatingly. In his 1964 book, The Nature of Design, industrial designer David Pye attempted to lay to rest the very notion of success: “Nothing we design or make ever really works. We can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does,” he wrote. “Everything we design and make is an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional.” The network computer was the embodiment of that: It didn’t work as promised, it was too early, and it cost too much. But looking back now, it’s hard to see it as anything but a success.

[Audio] NPR On The Media interview about Demand Media: "News Ex Machina"

2009-10-30T17:00:00-04:00

Oct. 30, 2009 Online content provider Demand Media has found a formula, literally, for generating its many, often instructional, articles and videos. Think of it as a cut-rate Associated Press, except instead of human beings thinking up story ideas an algorithm does. Wired magazine’s Daniel Roth explains. Transcript. Listen Now. BOB GARFIELD: Leonard Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post, is co-author of “The Reconstruction of American Journalism”. News may be taking a hit, but there’s no shortage of content on the Internet. One of the largest content providers is a company you've probably never heard of. Based in Santa Monica, California, Demand Media churns out thousands of articles and videos every day for its own network of websites and places like YouTube. Like many Internet successes, Demand Media has a formula, literally a formula, for generating its brief quasi-news items. Here’s how it works: A specialized computer algorithm finds the most popular search terms on the Internet, crosses those with a list of keywords paid for by advertisers for adjacency to those searches and then crosses those with – Well, Daniel Roth is a senior writer for Wired magazine, and he wrote about the company recently. He can explain it better with a real example. DANIEL ROTH: The algorithm sees that people are searching for these two words: “cake” - “butterfly.” For some reason the keyword rates are pretty high, and there’s not a lot of content out there right now that has “cake” and “butterfly” in it. It then takes those two words, sends it off to another algorithm, which then looks to see what other longer searches have used the words “cake” “butterfly.” They might find something that says “cake decorating, butterfly, free, how to make.” A proofreader, this person who gets eight cents a headline, looks at it and comes up with a headline: “How to Make Cake Decorating Butterflies.” Another proofreader gets another eight cents – [OVERTALK] BOB GARFIELD: Cake that, computers! [LAUGHTER] Take that! DANIEL ROTH: The humans, the humans come in and save the day. [OVERTALK] BOB GARFIELD: Only humans can create...

2009-10-16T11:47:00-04:00

Online content is not worth very much. This may be a truism, but Rosenblatt has the hard, mathematical proof. It’s right there in black and white, in the Demand Media database — the lifetime value of every story, algorithmically derived, and very, very small. Most media companies are trying hard to increase those numbers, to boost the value of their online content until it matches the amount of money it costs to produce. But Rosenblatt thinks they have it exactly backward. Instead of trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it — perhaps an impossible proposition — the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value.

[Audio] NPR On The Media interview about Netflix: "Cutting the Cable"

2009-09-29T12:41:12-04:00

Sept. 25, 2009 Last year, Netflix spent about a quarter of its $1.4 billion sending its little red envelopes back and forth through the mail. That’s why it would rather stream movies directly to your TV. As Wired reporter Daniel Roth tells it, if Netflix can cut the same content deals with Hollywood as Comcast and Time Warner - this could be the beginning of the end for cable. Interview by Bob Garfield. Transcript. Listen Now. BOB GARFIELD: Last year, Netflix spent about a quarter of its 1.4 billion dollars of revenue sending little red DVD envelopes back and forth through the mail. That’s why it would rather stream movies directly to your computer, a service it now offers for a limited number of titles. But most people don't like watching movies on their computers, and feeding a film from a computer to a TV is possible, but kind of complicated? So Netflix made deals with Samsung and Microsoft and LG to put Netflix’s software into game consoles, and TVs and DVD players, to make it absurdly easy for you to stream one of its movies directly onto your flat screen. It’s far cheaper for Netflix - no postage - more convenient for you - no waiting - and terrifying for the cable companies, which are also in the business of delivering movies to your TV. As reporter Daniel Roth explains in the October issue of Wired, if Netflix can cut the same content deals with Hollywood as Comcast and Time Warner have, this could be the beginning of the end for the cable companies. DANIEL ROTH: The entire entertainment industry is built around the idea that you won't be able to go around your cable company. Everyone from Hollywood to Comcast to Cox and Time Warner Cable, they all depend on getting that beautiful monthly subscription bill that you and I pay every month and think there’s no other way around it except to pay it. What Netflix is doing is figuring out a way around that. BOB GARFIELD: Let's talk about the Hollywood studios for a moment. They...

Netflix Inside

2009-09-29T12:18:07-04:00

There are a million different ways for Netflix to fail. But that has always been the case. Netflix should have failed already, taken down by Blockbuster or Wal-Mart, kneecapped by Hollywood, made irrelevant by BitTorrent or iTunes. Yet time and again, the company has not only survived but quietly thrived—on the strength of its unique algorithms and its relentless focus on getting customers content they didn't even know they wanted.

Revenge of the Nerds

2009-08-25T13:17:28-04:00

Revenge of the Nerds If we want to reform education, we have to make it cool to be a geek. WIRED magazine September 2009 (17.09) issue By Daniel Roth Earlier this year in midtown Manhattan, a local venture capital firm staged a daylong conference on school reform. Authors, professors, financiers, and entrepreneurs took over the French Institute's skylighted penthouse and earnestly discussed how embracing "digital culture"—from deploying videogame-style rewards to encouraging kids to develop online reputations—could completely transform education. Outsiders were invited to participate via Twitter, and their ideas were projected on the wall. It was a high-minded, tech-centric affair—until Alex Grodd brought it back to earth. Although Grodd now runs a site that lets educators share lesson plans, he started out teaching at inner-city middle schools in Atlanta and Boston. The businesspeople in the room represented a world in which innovation requires disruption. But Grodd knew their ideas would test poorly with real disrupters: kids in a classroom. "The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in," Grodd told the group. "And pretty universally, it's cool to rebel." In other words, prepare for you and your netbook to be jeered out of the room. "The best schools," Grodd told me later, "are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get As. That's an art." It's an art that has, for the most part, been lost on educators. The notion itself seems incredibly daunting—until you look at one maligned subculture in which the smartest members are also the most popular: the geeks. If you want to reform schools, you've got to make them geekier. "Geeks get things done. They're possessed. They can't help themselves," says Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of eight charter schools in San Diego County collectively called High Tech High. He has come up with a curriculum that forces kids to embrace their inner geek by pushing them to create. The walls, desks, and ceilings of his classrooms teem with projects, from field guides on local wildlife...

Street Smarts

2009-06-22T14:08:00-04:00

Street Smarts The crash could loosen the financial world's grip on bright young minds. WIRED magazine July 2009 (17.07) issue By Daniel Roth Walking around Wall Street these days is like being trapped inside the videogame Resident Evil. There are the dead (Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns), the undead (AIG, which survives only as long as the government needs it to), and the living scared (every suit who still has a job). Even with the occasional announcement of a good fiscal quarter from one of the banks, it's hard to see anything but neutron-bomb-like decimation. The glory days of Wall Street's dominance are done. No one likes to see an industry die, but there is an upside: Often, smart cubicle refugees will seize the opportunity to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, unleashing waves of innovation upon society. The death of Big Steel in the 1980s gave birth to nimbler, more competitive mini-mills. The decline of the Hollywood studio system in the '60s gave us independent films. And the current demise of print media is giving us new sources of information, as journalists band together to reinvent news coverage. Wall Street's turn is next, and we should all be praying for one thing: that many of those liberated innovators seek playing fields outside of finance. (more)

My interview with Better Place CEO Shai Agassi

2009-06-15T10:00:00-04:00

The interview took place at the Wired: Disruptive By Design business conference, June 15, 2009 at the Morgan Library in New York City.

Gestures of War

2009-03-23T20:39:44-04:00

Suddenly, Apple and other tech companies are preparing to slug it out over gestures that humans have been making since we developed opposable digits.

Road Map for Financial Recovery: Transparency Now!

2009-02-24T10:21:04-05:00

The Road Map For Recovery The financial world doesn't need new regulations. It needs radical transparency. Make companies report results in easy to understand, easy to crunch numbers—and let investors do the rest. WIRED magazine March 2009 (17.03) issue By Daniel Roth On the morning of March 29, 1933, dozens of reporters filed into the Oval Office for a press conference with the new president. Franklin Roosevelt had taken office earlier that month amid the greatest economic crisis the US had seen: 5,700 banks had failed, 25 percent of the country was unemployed, and more than half of all mortgages were in default. Hope for a recovery was dim; the public had lost faith in the entire financial system. The number of American investors had exploded, from a few hundred thousand before 1916 to more than 16 million. Yet few of them understood the investments they held, many of which had proven to be junk. Supposedly sound companies were exposed as pyramid schemes. Of the $50 billion in securities sold in the previous decade, half had become worthless. And yet, as reporters huddled around his desk, Roosevelt sounded confident. "I have something on the Securities Bill today," he announced. That day, members of his brain trust were on Capitol Hill, submitting a plan that would spark the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One overriding concept lay at the center of the legislation: transparency. Louis Brandeis, before becoming a Supreme Court justice, had written an exposé of the financial system for Harper's Weekly, and one passage in particular had lodged in Roosevelt's brain: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. Electric lights the most efficient policeman." The proposed bill would require, for the first time, companies to file detailed accounts of their financial health and activity, and bankers would have to report their fees and commissions. As Roosevelt explained it to the reporters around him, the bill "applies the new doctrine of caveat vendor in place of the old doctrine of caveat emptor. In other words, 'Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.' In other...

[Audio] NPR On The Media interview about Comcast

2009-02-20T10:23:00-05:00

February 20, 2009 Comcast is now the cable monopoly in 40 of the top 50 markets. It’s the third largest phone company in the US, and the largest provider of broadband internet to homes, with nearly 15 million customers, many of whom apparently hate Comcast. Wired Magazine senior writer Daniel Roth parses the troubled reputation of a media giant. Interview by Brooke Gladstone. Listen Now

Torture Me Elmo: Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights?

2009-01-22T16:41:47-05:00

Over the past few months legions of $60 Elmo Live dolls have joined families everywhere. Some are certainly doomed to join previous Elmos in a new pastime: robotic-toy torture. YouTube is full of videos of idiots dousing Elmo with gas, setting him on fire, and laughing as his red fur turns to charcoal and he writhes in a painful dance. I've seen videos of the incineration of T.M.X. Elmo (short for Tickle Me Extreme); they made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to laugh—Elmo giggled absurdly through the whole ordeal—but I also felt sick about what was going on. Why? I hardly shed a tear when the printer in Office Space got smashed to bits. Slamming my refrigerator door never leaves me feeling guilty. Yet give something a couple of eyes and the hint of lifelike abilities and suddenly some ancient region of my brain starts firing off empathy signals.

Comcast: Brian Roberts, The Dark Lord of Broadband

2009-01-22T10:47:39-05:00

By blocking BitTorrent—in effect discriminating against those packets—Comcast CEO Brian Roberts had opened himself up to accusations that he was a censor and a monopolist who wanted to limit citizens' access to the Internet. He was painted as power-mad, unable to restrain himself. "Comcast will say, 'We're not blocking.' But they're degrading, prioritizing, and filtering, without telling users. And they're planning to do much more of this," blogged Susan Crawford, an Internet law professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Roberts hadn't anticipated the backlash. Subscribers accepted that cable TV was just entertainment, but the Internet felt more essential, like water or electricity, and consumers were starting to think of broadband as a constitutional right. Back in the days of basic cable, consumer complaints were always local and easily contained. But the Internet, as it turned out, was different. This was becoming a nationwide battle over who the pipes belonged to. Comcast had invested billions to build its network. Now its heaviest users were demanding that Roberts effectively hand over control to them.

Economy: Back to the Garage

2008-11-25T12:53:07-05:00

Back to the Garage When the economy is in turmoil, the time is ripe for ambitious innovation. WIRED magazine December 2008 (16.12) issue By Daniel Roth In July 1993, Tom Siebel launched Siebel Systems, which made software for managing corporate sales staffs. The US economy was faltering, and the market for his product was new and untested. In other words, the timing couldn't have been better. The tech veteran picked up some inexpensive, underworked software engineers, secured office space in run-down East Palo Alto—at 11 cents a square foot—and bought office equipment at auctions held by the companies failing all around him. His own desk was a folding table. By the time he had his first release ready in 1995, he had spent less than $1 million on overhead and had an offering that none of the other major software companies could challenge. Investors made Siebel's June 1996 IPO—debuting just as the stock market was picking up steam—one of the year's top performers. Tom Siebel soon became one of the richest people in the US. "It was a great way to start a company," he says. (more)

Henry Blodget: Reinventing Henry

2008-11-25T11:02:41-05:00

Reinventing Henry Henry Blodget—yeah, that guy from the last bubble—is back, selling himself as an Internet entrepreneur. The haters are still angry, but his straight-talking analysis of the Web world is earning him new fans. WIRED magazine December 2008 (16.12) issue By Daniel Roth Henry Blodget has never gotten used to the chorus of hate that follows his every move. He's merely learned to live with it. When he started his personal blog in 2005, the comments dripped with disgust. "You are a boldface liar," a reader wrote. "Give me one reason why I should believe what you are writing," said another. And that was just in response to Blodget's innocuous first entry. During his years as a star Wall Street analyst, his pronouncements were welcomed and celebrated; now he couldn't say hello without getting savaged. Just last August, TechCrunch mentioned that Blodget would be one of more than two dozen tech celebrities judging a contest for startups. Blodget knew what was coming, even if his hosts didn't. "Blodget is scum.... He is no longer the arrogant prick we saw in the '90s, but he's still scum," someone wrote. "A lot of people lost money listening to this dirtbag." "Blodget is a Web 1.0, bubble-creating has-been." "He is unethical." "He's as crooked as they come." I meet Blodget at the offices of his new business, a year-old site called Silicon Alley Insider, shortly after the TechCrunch beat-down. Alley Insider is one of many tech business blogs that feed news, earnings info, and rumors to investors and corporate insiders. But Alley Insider has one thing that others don't. Blodget. He's smart, he's skeptical, and he's got the kind of self-assured voice that sells well in the blogosphere. As the market sinks, his opinions are even more in demand, though he's still hated by a large portion of his prospective audience. (more)

[Audio] Living on Earth interview about Better Place

2008-10-24T11:38:00-04:00

Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman talks with Wired Magazine writer Daniel Roth about Better Place's unique approach to greening roadways. Listen now

Shai Agassi and the Future of the Electric Car

2008-08-19T11:50:40-04:00

The Future of the Electric Car pdf Shai Agassi has an audacious plan to put electric cars on the road. All he needs is a nationwide grid of charging stations—and a whole new business model for the auto industry. pdf WIRED magazine September 2008 (16.09) issue By Daniel Roth Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA. It's December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We've got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won't be a problem. At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he's not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world's addiction to fossil fuels. It's a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It's not exactly what this audience wants to hear. Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good....

The Google Phone

2008-06-21T14:48:36-04:00

The Google Phone pdf Here comes Android, the open source operating system that will break the corporate stranglehold on the wireless web, make it fun to surf from your cell, And (oh yeah) scoop up billions of dollars in mobile ads. WIRED magazine July 2008 (16.07) issue By Daniel Roth "Is this interesting to Google?" That's what Andy Rubin was asking Larry Page. It was a spring day in 2005, and the two were in a conference room just off the main lobby at Google's headquarters. A simple yes and Rubin would have walked away happy. They had met three years before, when Rubin was about to launch a smartphone he'd invented called the Sidekick. At the time, Google was just an up-and-comer, trailing AOL and even Lycos in traffic. But Rubin, a well-known Silicon Valley player, chose Google as the Sidekick's default search engine. Page was flattered by the unexpected endorsement. So when Rubin called out of the blue and requested this meeting, well, Page couldn't say no. The Google cofounder arrived late, as usual. Rubin walked to the whiteboard and began his pitch. There were nearly 700 million cell phones sold each year compared with fewer than 200 million PCs — and the gap was widening. Increasingly, he said, phones were the way people wanted to connect with each other and with everything else. Yet the mobile industry was stuck in the dark ages. Unlike the Web, where open standards had fostered a multitude of cool companies and applications, mobile was a tyrannical, closed system, repelling all innovators and disrupters who tried to gain entrance. (more)

Tech Trends: Open Source

2008-03-24T15:34:00-04:00

Tech Trends Open Source Software Made Developers Cool. Now It Can Make Them Rich? WIRED magazine April 2008 (16.04) issue By Daniel Roth Last spring, marketer and blogger Hugh MacLeod posted a question on his site: If open source is such a phenomenon, where are all the open source billionaires? His audience wasn't amused. Open source software relies on a community of volunteer developers who tinker on, write for, or amend a program, then give it away free. MacLeod's site filled up with complaints that even to look for billionaires violated the spirit of the open source movement. "There have to be rewards," one commenter wrote, "but they don't have to be financial." Another simply recommended that MacLeod "shut the fuck up," adding: "You don't know what you're talking about." (more) But not every open-sourcer has proven so averse to filthy lucre. A number of open source companies have recently attracted investments and merger interest: Whether they like it or not — and let's face it, they probably do — more and more open source creators are striking it rich. In 2007, some 30 open source software companies were purchased for more than $1 billion — double the number of sales in 2005, according to consulting firm 451 Group. And 2008 is proving to be even more frenetic. In January alone, Sun Microsystems announced the purchase of open source pioneer MySQL for $1 billion; open source development players Covalent and SpringSource merged; and Nokia agreed to pay $153 million for the open source mobile-software maker Trolltech. On Wall Street, bankers are rooting around for a good open source company to take public. "People call us all the time," says John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, which oversees the open source Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail application. "We're a valuable thing." On his Silicon Alley Insider site, defrocked Wall Street analyst Henry Blodgett recently estimated that the for-profit arm of Mozilla was worth between $1.5 billion and $4 billion. Lilly says the estimate is about right but that Mozilla is staying private. "As long as we can pay the bills, we can...

[Audio] NPR interview about online piracy

2008-02-08T00:23:00-05:00

NPR interview about Media Defender and online piracy February 08, 2008 Daniel Roth talks to On the Media's Bob Garfield about the entertainment industries ongoing (and losing) battles against piracy. Listen Now

Hacking: The Pirates Can't Be Stopped

2008-01-15T16:30:25-05:00

The Pirates Can't Be Stopped A lone teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning? Condé Nast Portfolio February 2008 issue By Daniel Roth From: Ty Heath [MediaDefender] Sent: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 7:02 p.m. To: it Subject: pm webserver The 65.120.42.146 pm webserver has been compromised […] As a side note, please do not ever use the old passwords on anything. The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet: News Corp., Time Warner, Universal. Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches. MediaDefender's main stalking grounds are the destinations that help people find and download movies and music for free. Sites such as the Pirate Bay and networks like Lime Wire rely on peer-to-peer, or P2P, software, which allows users to connect with one another and easily share files. MediaDefender monitors...

Gilt Trip: Hedge fundies start worrying about their wealth

2007-12-01T15:45:00-05:00

Gilt Trip Everyone else already hates them. Now even hedge-funders are starting to feel bad about their wealth. Condé Nast Portfolio December 2007 issue By Daniel Roth In late August, Jeff Tarrant was driving home from his midtown Manhattan office when he heard a radio report on a topic that he knew intimately: the subprime meltdown. The founder of Protégé Partners, a fund of hedge funds, Tarrant had had a good year betting that the mortgage mess would continue and was following the story closely. Still, he was taken aback when a young investor interviewed on the segment suggested that the crisis should be contained by regulating hedge funds. "I'm sitting back and thinking, 'Subprime had nothing to do with hedge funds,' " Tarrant recalls. "It was rating agencies. The funny thing is, here's a kid on the street. He probably had $10,000 in his I.R.A., and he's blaming the hedge funds! How did that happen?" Hmm, how did the average investor come to be suspicious of secretive, ultrawealthy money movers? It doesn't take hours at a Bloomberg terminal to come up with the answer. Perhaps Tarrant and his peers should be wrestling instead with how to fix the problem. Because, while it may be technically correct to say that hedge funds aren't to blame for the subprime-mortgage market's collapse, reality is sometimes trumped by perception. And hedge funds, in an increasingly populist America, are not perceived positively. What's needed is a correction. For these money managers not to be seen as the Legion of Doom, they have to win back the public's confidence, or more realistically, its ambivalence. Players big and small should start asking—and answering—uncomfortable questions about how they make their money and how much they give back. They should tone down the hubris. Show up in the cheap seats at a ballgame. Or at least mingle with the fans after buying the team. A few in the industry have actually admitted that they're feeling queasy. In June, Nicholas Ferguson, chairman of SVG Capital, a British private equity shop, told the Financial Times that he couldn't figure out why...

Barry Sternlicht: Revenge of the Hotel King

2007-09-17T15:14:00-04:00

Revenge of the Hotel King Barry Sternlicht revolutionized the hotel world as he built Starwood into an $12.4 billion empire. Now he has to prove himself again. But will he ever satisfy his harshest critic? Condé Nast Portfolio October 2007 issue By Daniel Roth Barry Sternlicht’s chauffeur-driven black G.M.C. Yukon rolls up to a crumbling brick building on the wrong side of the Stamford, Connecticut, train tracks. It’s a warm fall morning, and a nearby field of dumpsters casts a rank smell over the block. The site was a heavily used auditorium and dental clinic for workers at the Yale & Towne lock factory. When the plant closed in the late 1950s, the building started its inexorable decline: The windows are blacked out or broken; the front-door frame is stripped and exposed; inside, wires hang from where lighting fixtures have been ripped down. But for the next few months, this littered wreck is going to be the unlikeliest launching point for the greatest second act in American real estate. Sternlicht is the 46-year-old founder, former C.E.O., and ex-chairman of Starwood Hotels. Just two years ago, he was the most influential person in the hotel world, commanding one of the industry’s largest operations: 733 hotels, 231,000 rooms, 120,000 employees and more than $5 billion in revenue. Starting with a small, nearly bankrupt real estate investment trust he bought in the mid-1990s for $120 million, Sternlicht gobbled up name brands like Sheraton and Westin; dreamed up a new chain, the W, that appealed to the young, Kenneth Cole-wearing executive class; and transformed the St. Regis from a stand-alone hotel in New York into a worldwide luxury chain. He was the thirtysomething fireball of the hotel business, revolutionizing the industry and stealing customers and glory from slow-moving giants like Marriott and Hilton. In the process, he created countless enemies outside the firm by openly mocking his competitors’ conservative ways and, internally, by ignoring veterans’ opinions and relentlessly hounding his senior executives.< “In the hotel industry, he embarrassed a lot of people,” says Ted Darnall, chief operating officer of HEI Hotels & Resorts and...

Cerberus/Chrysler: The Most Dangerous Deal in America

2007-08-20T14:54:00-04:00

The Most Dangerous Deal in America Inside the secretive world of Cerberus Capital—and why its plan to save Chrysler spooks Wall Street. Condé Nast Portfolio September 2007 issue By Daniel Roth This is what the people came for, but Stephen Feinberg looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else. He stands motionless on one end of the sprawling stage, practically hiding behind a lectern decorated with the massive golden coat of arms of Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria. The Wall Street investors who pack the room sit expectantly, ignoring—for the first time all morning—their BlackBerrys, which scroll silently in their pockets. Feinberg, who is 47, sports thinning brown hair and a wispy mustache. Without any notes, he launches into a meandering speech. Between long pauses, he wends his way through market analyses that seem deliberately vague. At the heart of his speech, he sums up the philosophy that guides his company: Reveal as little as necessary; be anonymous; be invisible. “We try to hide religiously,” he says. “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.” There are a few nervous laughs. Since graduating from Princeton 25 years ago, Feinberg has never given an interview and has never been photographed by the press. Not that there has been much demand until now. On Wall Street, the C.E.O. of Cerberus Capital Management, an investment firm with $26 billion in assets under management, has long been admired. (“You probably think you’re smart,” says one former employee. “Now take your brain and mine, take them to the 28th power, and you have Steve Feinberg.”) To the general public, though, Cerberus has been just another shadowy buyer of companies in an already overpopulated field. The firm’s purchases include a grab bag of brands that lurk on the edge of consumer consciousness: Fila sporting goods, Mervyn’s department stores, Alamo and National rental cars, Air Canada, the GMAC lending arm of General Motors. All that changed on May 14 when another mustachioed C.E.O.,...

[Video] CNBC: Inside Cerberus' Lair

2007-08-13T00:42:00-04:00

Inside Cerberus Lair CNBC Squawk Box interview about the secret world of Steve Feinberg and Cerberus.

Mohammed Al-Maktoum: The Sheik Who Would Be King of Horse Racing

2007-05-15T12:20:00-04:00

The Sheik Who Would Be King of Horse Racing He's spent more than $1 billion on horses, and built them their own 747. He's won the biggest races worldwide. Now the ruler of Dubai is taking his game to the U.S. Condé Nast Portfolio May 2007 issue By Daniel Roth Betting is not allowed at the Nad al-Sheba racetrack in Dubai. Gambling is illegal in the United Arab Emirates, so the thousands of race fans there spend the intervals between post times kicking soccer balls or buying trinkets from vendors who lay out their wares on the Bermuda grass. It’s a cool night in January—it gets too hot here to race during the day—and floodlights illuminate the five-story, glass-and-steel space-station-style grandstands. In the distance are the skyscrapers Dubai is famous for; almost all have cranes on top, signaling that they’re only going to get higher. Just after 9:30 p.m., the crowd suddenly starts moving, packing in tightly near the parade ring, where the winning horses and jockeys receive their prizes. Kufis brush against baseball caps as locals strain to get a view of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who has stopped by to take in the action. Sheik Mohammed is the ruler of Dubai, the prime minister of the seven-state United Arab Emirates, and the most powerful man in the world of horse racing. At 57, he moves with an athlete’s quickness. At one point, while chatting with a jockey, he lifts the hem of his blue dishdasha, revealing a heavily muscled calf. On his head is a crisp white headdress. He turns to a slim British man standing next to him: “Who won?” Simon Crisford manages Godolphin, Sheik Mohammed’s top racing operation. A onetime Racing Post writer, Crisford now spends half the year in Dubai and half in his native Britain. “A German horse, sir,” says Crisford. “That’s good!” says Sheik Mohammed, smiling broadly. “Very good.” The German owners not only beat Sheik Mohammed’s entry, which placed second, but walked away with $72,000—much, if not all, of it the ruler’s money. At most tracks, the house skims off a...

[Video] Mohammed Al-Maktoum: Sheik Mohammed's Vision

2007-05-15T06:00:00-04:00

Sheik Mohammed's Vision Senior Writer Daniel Roth talks about Sheik Mohammed's plans for Dubai.

[Audio] NPR interview on Sheik Mohammed's Derby plans

2007-05-05T00:07:00-04:00

Sheik Mohammed's Expensive Horse Obsession Weekend Edition Saturday, May 5, 2007. Daniel Roth talks to Scott Simon of Weekend Edition about Sheik Mohammed and why he doesn't have a horse running this year. Listen Now [5 min 3 sec]

Anime: It's... Profitmón!

2006-02-24T16:50:16-05:00

It's... Profitmón! From Pokémon to Full Metal Panic, the anime industry is doing everything the rest of show biz isn't: embracing technology, coddling fans--and making a killing. December 12, 2005 By DANIEL ROTH It was 2 A.M. when John Ledford heard the banging at his door. Stumbling from bed on that night in the fall of 1999, he threw on a robe over his boxers and opened the door of his Houston apartment to a twentysomething guy with glasses and a face full of freckles. Ledford was about to tell him he had the wrong apartment when the stranger launched into a speech. At that moment, Ledford knew: This visit was no accident. This stranger was an otaku. Translated literally, the word is Japanese for "your household." But for obscure reasons, otaku morphed in modern Japan to connote a scarily hard-core fan, a nerd obsessed with a hobby to the point of unhealthiness. In the U.S. the otaku's infatuation is focused on anime--the Japanese style of animation that typically features saucer-eyed women and giant mechanical men. American otaku wear the label with pride. The specimen at Ledford's door was going on about an anime TV show called Neon Genesis Evangelion, a series about humans fighting an alien invasion. He had a problem with the ending. "I don't like the direction you went in and I want you to go back and fix it," he demanded. Ledford explained that he didn't make the show and closed the door. He was rattled by the nocturnal visit--later that morning, leaving for Japan, he called his assistant and told her to find him a new place to live. But he should have known: That's what happens when your customers are wild with desire. Ledford is CEO of AD Vision, the largest importer and distributor of anime in the country. ADV may not have made Evangelion, but it did get the show into the hands of American otaku. "The hard-core fan base is very rabid," says Ledford. "They will get behind you as a company. You don't have to spend a dollar in marketing; you...

Bittorrent: The Great Disrupter

2005-11-29T11:53:10-05:00

Torrential Reign Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent software made it a cinch to pirate films on the Internet. So why is Hollywood on his side? from the Oct. 17, 2005 issue By Daniel Roth For two years after the dot-com crash, Bram Cohen could almost always be found at his small dining-room table, first in San Francisco’s Nob Hill and later in Oakland. His long brown hair would flop in front of his eyes, and he’d curl it back over his ears as he stared at the screen of his Dell laptop, writing line after line after line of code. Occasionally Cohen would take breaks—there was a club to visit some nights, a conference on coding to help organize, a trip to Amsterdam—but then he’d return to his wooden chair, his keyboard on his lap, his laptop propped up on some books, his back perfectly straight (thanks to posture classes he was taking), and he’d program some more. First he lived off savings from the handful of jobs he’d worked during the bubble. When that ran out, he lived off credit cards, following a rigid system for applying for and transferring debt to 0% introductory-rate cards. Friends would ask what he was doing. Why wouldn’t he just get a job? Cohen shooed them away. He was determined to solve a puzzle that was consuming him. Since the birth of the Net, programmers had been stumped by how to transfer massive files—movies, TV shows, games, software, whatever—without incurring astronomical bills or risking frequent failure. Cohen knew he could find a solution; all it would take was time, good code, and brute intellect. He had all three. The money would take care of itself. “I didn’t have any clear plans when I first started,” he says. “I wasn’t worried, partially because what I was doing was really cool, and partially because I’m broken and can’t feel anxiety. Cohen is not being self-deprecating. He never is. The 30-year-old speaks in a disarmingly literal way about almost everything, including—and because of—his Asperger’s syndrome. Often tagged as the “little-professor syndrome,” the mild form of autism tends to...

Buffett and Gates: The $91 Billion Conversation

2005-10-31T15:09:00-05:00

BUFFETT: The biggest problem we have is in terms of rogue states, terrorists, and nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Economically, I think the U.S. is going to be fine. If the rest of the world's GDP per capita grows faster than ours, that's the way it should be. GATES: It's too bad that economics isn't taught or a hobby for lots of people, because you do run into those who seem to say, "There's only a certain number of jobs." That's not the case. Let's say tomorrow we could decide that everyone in India is as rich as we are. Would the world be a better place? Certainly. Would the U.S. thrive more because of the great products and work that would be done over there? Absolutely. The world getting richer is a great thing. It has been a great thing. It will continue to be.

Estée Lauder's Dynasty: Sweet Smell of Succession

2005-10-03T16:39:46-04:00

Sweet Smell of Succession Dynasties don't last forever. But Estée Lauder's grandkids aren't about to let this beauty empire crumble. from the Sept. 19, 2005 issue By Daniel Roth Every few months the two women gather in the CEO's office to talk about their problems. Both of them--the glamorous, creative type with a fondness for A-list events and the shy, no-nonsense manager who spends her days marketing to soccer moms--get a chance to give the chief executive a piece of their mind. Sometimes they even bring in a moderator to keep the discussion flowing. There's probably a plot for a bad reality show in this scenario; certainly it's an unorthodox use of the CEO's time. But when you're family, you do what you have to do. And in the case of the Estée Lauder Cos., the giant of the prestige-cosmetics world, family is everything. So CEO William Lauder and his cousins Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, who oversees the Estée Lauder brand's image, and Jane Lauder, a vice president at a new division called BeautyBank, gather and clear the decks: What's bothering them? What is working and what is not? The caution makes sense. Around the world the conventional wisdom is that they will fail. Not them, exactly, but their generation: the grandchildren of a legendary founder. The Italians say, "Dalle stalle, alle stelle, alle stalle"-- "From the barn stalls, to the stars, back to the barn stalls." In Yiddish it's "Schmattes to schmattes in three generations," or up from rags and back down. In Chinese, it is chilly and blunt: "Wealth does not pass three generations." But Estée Lauder's grandchildren are doing everything they can to make sure the proverbs won't apply to them. The world of cosmetics and fashion is watching closely to see if they can pull it off. In April 2004, Estée Lauder, the longtime undisputed queen of the cosmetics world, died at age 96. Three months later William became CEO, taking over a job that his father, Leonard, once held. The family business--the Lauders control 82% of the company's voting shares--continues to dominate the high-end beauty industry,...

The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy

2005-06-01T17:38:28-04:00

BRAINSTORM The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy Tuesday, May 17, 2005 By Daniel Roth It's doubtful that Steve Jobs ever faced these kinds of interruptions. "Daddy, I want to take a picture," says Owen Misterovich, motioning to a digital camera on his father's desk. "Okay," says Pat Misterovich, handing it to his 5-year-old son, who proceeds to snap a few self-portraits. Then it's back to the work at hand: producing the next great MP3 music player. Only instead of the simple, elegant lines of the iPod, Misterovich's device will look just like a Pez dispenser. Oh, and instead of working from a corporate campus in Cupertino, Calif., with nearly 12,000 employees, Misterovich is a stay-at-home dad, creating his Pez MP3 player from the basement of his Springfield, Mo., home. Misterovich is the former head of IT at the University of Detroit Mercy. He has few of the engineering skills necessary to build a device like this, no marketing experience, and absolutely no corporate infrastructure. And yet he's got two factories—one in China, one in the U.S.—vying to build the player. He has a small Austin company started by an ex-Apple engineer designing the innards. And on his blog, pezmp3.com, he uses prospective buyers—some 1,500 people have already expressed interest—as an R&D-center-meets-focus-group. What's better, he asks, AAA batteries or Li-Ion? In come dozens of replies ("Go for the AAA with a USB NiMh recharger if possible," suggests one reader). What's a good slogan? Some 50 ideas roll in (one of the best: "Candy for your ears"). By the end of this month the first prototype should be in Misterovich's hands. "I don't know that this product could have come to life years ago," he says. "I seriously doubt it. And if it did, it wouldn't have come through a guy in his basement." It used to be that a tinkerer like Misterovich could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company. More likely, he'd entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible,...

Can Nike Still Do It Without Phil Knight?

2005-03-25T15:22:20-05:00

Can Nike Still Do It Without Phil Knight? Now that Knight has stepped down, it’s up to new CEO Bill Perez to channel one of the most inscrutable, contradictory, and inspirational leaders around. from the April 4, 2005 issue By Daniel Roth I had been warned that the interview would be a crapshoot. On some days Phil Knight opens up; on others he barely says a word. I got lucky. On this gray January morning the founder of Nike was willing to talk. Perhaps Knight felt nostalgic: He had just finished his last official day as CEO of the company he had built from scratch some 40 years earlier, and this was his first—and so far only—extensive interview. Or perhaps he just wanted to talk. No one ever really knows with Knight; they just take what they can get. Tinker Hatfield, a 24-year Nike veteran, told me that when he goes to Knight with a question, sometimes Knight doesn’t even answer. (Tinker says he simply treats that as a yes.) Whatever the reason, Knight happily ruminated on the highs and lows of his career; he reminisced about the joys of building his company, about the hunt for a successor, about the athletes he had signed—good and bad—and about the people he had managed—well and not so well. He talked, haltingly, about the death of his son last May. Knight, famous for wearing his sunglasses just about everywhere—even inside the buildings on Nike’s 176-acre campus in Beaverton, Ore.—kept the Nike shades off, though they were always within his reach on the table in the small conference room. There was only one question that got shot down, and it came as we were wrapping up. "May I see your office?" I asked. Knight didn’t speak; he simply shook his head. "You don’t want to show it?" Again, he shook his head. It wasn’t a surprise. Few employees, let alone an outsider, have ever been in Knight’s office. One executive who works closely with Knight told me he hadn’t been in there in almost a decade. The only thing that anyone seems to...

Why There's No Escaping the Blog

2004-12-28T22:56:55-05:00

10 TECH TRENDS Why There's No Escaping the Blog Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore. from the Jan. 10, 2005 issue By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth Early in the evening of Dec. 1, Microsoft revealed that it planned to take over the world of blogs—the five-million-plus web journals that have exploded on the Internet in the past few years. The company's weapon would be a new service called MSN Spaces, online software that allows people to easily create and maintain blogs. It didn't take long for the blogging world to do what it does best: swarm around a new piece of information; push, prod, and poke at it; and leave it either stronger or a bloody mess. The next day, at the widely read Boing Boing blog, co-editor Xeni Jardin opted to do the latter. She titled her critique of MSN Spaces "7 Dirty Blogs" and hilariously sent up the fickle censoring filters Microsoft appeared to have built in. MSN Spaces prohibited her from starting a blog called Pornography and the Law or another entitled Corporate Whore Chronicles; yet World of Poop passed, as did the educational Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide for Teens. Within the first hour of Jardin's post, five blogs had linked to it, including the site of widely read San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor. By the end of the day there were dozens of blogs pointing readers to "7 Dirty Blogs," a proliferation of links that over the next few weeks topped 300. There were Italian blogs and Chinese blogs and blogs in Greek, German, and Portuguese. There were blogs with names like Tie-Dyed Brain Waves, Stubborn Like a Mule, and LibertyBlog. Each added its own tweak. "Ooooh, that's what I want: a blog that doesn't allow me to speak my mind," wrote a blogger called Kung Pow Pig. The conversation had clearly gotten out of Microsoft's hands. Typically Microsoft would have taken the hits and kept powering forward. That is the Microsoft way. For years such behavior has done...

China Tries to Kick the Piracy Habit

2004-12-28T22:30:00-05:00

TEN TECH TRENDS China Tries to Kick the Piracy Habit All of a sudden, China's entrepreneurs are asking for protection from intellectual-property thieves. from the Jan. 10, 2005 issue By Daniel Roth Ben Ye is one of China's many rising young stars. At 24, he won the first round of a business-plan competition at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University with a proposal for a web-conferencing company. Rather than stay in the competition, Ye took his idea and started a business called V2 Technology. He has been able to raise $1.3 million and build a 70-person company, yet the plan didn't account for one potentially fatal threat: pirates. Two years ago, when V2's software hit the market, resellers called to say that cheap, illegal copies were already being hawked. Ye's lawyers declared that the only way to get relief was to find the pirates, collect evidence, and bring it to the cops. "We said, 'Forget it,'" says Ye. "We aren't Sherlock Holmes." He eventually engineered a solution—new versions of the software will work only if the user plugs a V2 "dongle" into a USB port on a computer, the digital equivalent of a car's ignition key. But coming up with that fix took time and resources that could have been spent improving the software. Ye's situation is hardly rare in China, a country that has all but replaced its red flag with the Jolly Roger. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office says that 66% of the counterfeit goods seized at American borders now come from mainland China, up from 16% five years ago. Inside China's booming market, things aren't much better. A recent study by tech researcher IDC, paid for by the Business Software Alliance trade group, found that 92% of all software used in China is counterfeit. China is now tied with Vietnam as the country most likely to steal. U.S. firms have spent decades trying to persuade China to crack down on IP theft. Now, due largely to the influence of entrepreneurs like Ye, China finally seems to be getting the message. With the nation producing homegrown intellectual property, IP...

Salesforce.com: The Big Benioff

2004-11-29T11:34:18-05:00

Salesforce.com: The Big Benioff He's perhaps the most charming, cocky, pr-blitzing, eastern-religion touting, pushy showman in tech. but is Marc Benioff possibly also right? from the Dec. 13, 2004 issue By Daniel Roth "I'm glad you're here," Vivek Ranadivé, the CEO of Tibco Software, says to me as he bounds up the stairs of his Palo Alto headquarters. "You're going to watch me sell to Marc." Marc is Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, a five-year-old company, half the size of Tibco, that offers a web-based program companies use to track and analyze all of their sales and support functions. Ranadivé ushers us into a conference room, where he has a team ready with a presentation on why Salesforce.com needs to rewrite itself using Tibco's recently acquired application development software. Almost as soon as the demonstration starts, though, it's clear that Ranadivé wishes I weren't there. He's not selling; he's getting sold. "This is much bigger than you think it is," says Benioff, cutting off the presentation. "This is a tremendous opportunity for Tibco. But you need to build a five- to ten-year plan to really take this seriously." Benioff leans forward. "If you do that, you'll take your company to another level. This is your greatest opportunity to go from doing $500 million worth of revenue to getting into the $1 billion to $2 billion club. Vivek, this is your opportunity. And we will help you." Benioff leaps to a whiteboard, grabs a marker, and sketches the details of Salesforce.com: how the system works, how an "ecosystem" of companies selling add-ons to his software is growing around it. Tibco shouldn't try to hawk a product to him, Benioff says; it should transform itself into a Salesforce.com partner, selling to the 12,500 companies using Salesforce.com. He talks about Tibco's joining a worldwide Salesforce.com road show, about creating "webinars" together, about how Tibco can thrive by grabbing onto the Salesforce.com rocket. Then he slyly suggests that Tibco could pilot its new tool in-house—all it would need to do would be to expand its use of Salesforce.com. "Okay, we'll do that," says...

In Search Of China's Bill Gates

2004-09-27T11:12:28-04:00

In Search Of China's Bill Gates Does one of these young entrepreneurs have what it takes to create China's first world-dominating company? from the Oct. 4, 2004 issue By Daniel Roth In the early 1990s, Wang Zhidong jumped into the sea, as the saying goes. The Beijing University graduate left a secure job to set up his own firm in an abandoned school near a street so crowded with stands hawking PC innards it was dubbed "Electronics Avenue." With a handful of friends, he crafted a program that enabled Microsoft Windows and Windows-compatible programs to work in Chinese. By 1997 the software was running on about 90% of the country's PCs. Then, as dot-com fever came to China, he decided to turn the company into an Internet portal. Wang suffered from the usual problems faced by tech entrepreneurs—lack of funds, contract issues, fear of Microsoft—but there were a few that Western CEOs have never had to deal with. One: whether to install toilets. In 1997 the American CFO of his company demanded that Wang put real toilets in the company's new office. Wang was flabbergasted; he had never worked in an office that had them and didn't understand why he couldn't just have the usual holes in the ground. "We Chinese are used to these toilets," he says. "We call it 'Chinese kung fu.' " The CFO begged, explaining that he had been making up an excuse every day at 3 p.m. to leave so that he could sneak back to his hotel and use the toilet there. Wang laughs his full-body giggle as he recounts the story. The company that didn't believe in modern plumbing became, in six short years, Sina, the Yahoo of China, with $160 million in revenues, millions of paying subscribers, $1.1 billion in market cap (the stock trades on Nasdaq)—and bathrooms full of toilets. And Wang, at 37, has become one of the godfathers of the Chinese tech world. Not that he's ready to settle fully into that role: He split with Sina in 2001 and started a new company, Dianji, which he thinks can...

Powell Takes a Pounding

2004-07-12T11:55:26-04:00

Amid all the Powell bashing, one curious thing has gone largely unnoticed: Even as his headline-grabbing big-media and big-telecom rules have run into trouble, Powell has managed to push through his vision of a tech-driven, lightly regulated future of communications

Seeing the World on Ten Coffees a Day

2004-06-28T12:57:24-04:00

A normal trip works like this: Winter maps out a route and loads his Honda Civic—bought for $4,000 on eBay—with a pile of Starbucks T-shirts, CDs (though the car lacks a CD player or even a tape deck), books, a computer, an egg-crate mattress, and, for protection, a baseball bat. He blazes through the stores (hitting a record 28 in one day on a swing through Portland, Ore., in 1999). At night he tries to find a Wal-Mart parking lot, where he can sleep in the Civic undisturbed. The car has no air conditioning and smells of stale coffee. It isn't all fun and games. "After about four stores, the coffee loses all taste," says Winter, who's unconcerned about any long-term effects of so much coffee. "It doesn't taste good at all—I'm not enjoying drinking it. After an extreme number of stores, I have to wash out the taste with water after every sip because it's starting to make me sick."

Larry Bird Finds Trump In His Backyard

2004-05-17T13:09:00-04:00

Still, Trump realizes he might, for once, be the underdog. "In French Lick, Larry has the advantage," he says (noting, however, "In Manhattan, Trump has the advantage"). There's also one other problem: The Indiana Gaming Commission says it's training a gimlet eye on Trump's bid, due to the company's $1.8 billion of debt and ongoing flirtation with bankruptcy.

Trump: The Trophy Life

2004-04-05T13:29:00-04:00

Trump says being cut off is the price people pay for moving on: "I've had many people leave who want to come back because they miss the Trump action. I would never have them back."

Skype: Catch Us If You Can

2004-01-26T13:38:00-05:00

Just 24 hours later and 5,700 miles away, Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, sits before academics, students, and telecom executives at the University of California at San Diego and explains that telecom as we know it is through. "I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype," he says. "When the inventors of Kazaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it's free—it's over. The world will change now inevitably."

Magna Cum Loud

2002-10-02T13:47:00-04:00

But at its base, being a DJ comes down to one thing: "You're responsible for everybody's good time," says Jahi Lake.

Terry Semel Thinks Yahoo Should Grow Up Already

2002-09-15T13:54:00-04:00

How well Yahoo does in broadband may be the real test of Semel's strategy, and his biggest gamble.

What Congress Doesn't Know Will Hurt You

2002-07-23T09:00:00-04:00

Carolyn Maloney (D-New York) to former Andersen partner Melvin Dick: "How did you not see some red flags when the taxes, the filed taxes of WorldCom, were so different from what they reported as their earnings?... Would that have helped you possibly uncover the fraud?" Jim Duncan, assistant professor of accounting at Ball State: "That was the most hilarious question asked."

Can EMC Restore Its Glory?

2002-07-08T09:00:00-04:00

Suddenly rivals and analysts were talking about EMC's very survival. "EMC lives or dies by its ability to continue to sell into its traditional FORTUNE 500 base," says Jon Oltsik, founder of IT consulting shop Hype-Free Consulting in Acton, Mass., and a former marketing manager at EMC. "If it can't figure out how to do that, then EMC as we know it goes away." As it turns out, EMC as we know it is going away--but by design.

Pat Robertson's Quest for Eternal Life

2002-05-28T15:30:00-04:00

"Pat's a very attractive guy to the masses--he really is,'' says Lowell Morse, who oversees Robertson's investments as head of Robertson Asset Management. "He is going to be a more attractive guy, in my opinion, when he's dead. People are not going to realize the impact he had until he's gone."

How to Cut Pay, Lay Off 8,000 People, and Still Have Workers Who Love You

2002-01-22T18:50:00-05:00

"I knew that this wasn't part of the HP Way, and it's not what Bill and Dave would have wanted," says Benjamin Steers, a 26-year-old IT worker who joined Agilent out of college. "But if they were faced with the same situation, they would have had to do the exact same thing. And even though all of us probably lost sleep worrying about our jobs and whether we'd have them or not, I know Ned probably lost a lot more having to get up there in front of everybody and make this announcement and have to let go people in his family."