TechCrunch
Netflix's Q2 Misses Due To Weaker-Than-Expected Subscriber Additions, Reports $1.07B In Revenue, And 49 Earnings Per Share
Netflix just released its second-quarter earnings report, missing analyst expectations with lower-than-expected subscriber numbers. For the second quarter, Netflix reported earnings of 49 cents per share on revenues of $1.07 billion. That compared to earnings of 11 cents per share on sales of $889 million in the year-ago quarter. Earnings were above analyst expectations of 40 cents a share, while revenues were in-line with the $1.07 billion forecast for the second quarter.
But the most closely watched number was probably Netflix’s domestic subscriber growth. On that front, the company reported net additions of 630,000, compared with 528,000 a year ago. The second quarter is typically a weak one for new subscribers, especially compared to the prior two quarters. Nevertheless, Netflix’s numbers were in-line with its guidance but it underperformed analyst expectations of domestic subscriber growth of around 700,000 net additions.
While Netflix’s push into original programming is working to get more people signed up and subscribing to the service, just not as quickly as some analyst bulls might have hoped. In the first quarter, Netflix released the Kevin Spacey-led political drama House of Cards, and has followed that up in the second quarter with the highly anticipated release of the fourth season of Arrested Development, as well as Eli Roth’s horror series Hemlock Grove. (Orange Is The New Black, the company’s latest original release, wasn’t reflected in the report, as it came out in the third quarter.)
Its shows have received a bit of critical acclaim recently, with Netflix receiving 14 Emmy nominations last week. That includes nine nominations for House Of Cards, three for Arrested Development, and two for Hemlock Grove.
For Netflix, this quarter’s financial results follow several strong quarters in a row, in which the company has outperformed analyst expectations. After a rough couple of quarters nearly two years ago, as it raised prices and separated its DVD and streaming business units. And those positive results have driven its stock price up, from a 52-week low of $52.81 up into the $260s today. But after today’s release, the stock is down about 5 percent in after-hours trading.
Google Brings Cloud Print To Windows, Makes Printer Sharing Easier
Google today launched a number of updates to Cloud Print that finally bring it to Windows and make it easier to share printers with others.
Even Google knows that there are still some occasions when you just need to print something, so for the last few years, the company has been steadily improving this service. At its core, Cloud Print allows you to share your printers with others and print virtually anything from anywhere.
There are plenty of “cloud-ready” printers on the market, which you can connect to the Internet and manage from your Google Cloud Print accounts. Until now, however, Google only supported Cloud Print in Chrome on Chrome OS. There are also some third-party tools for OS X and Windows, but until today Google itself didn’t really offer any support for third-party operating systems.
Today’s launch of the Cloud Print Service for Windows allows admins to easily connect their existing printers in their schools and businesses. The service runs in the background and connects your printers to Google’s cloud. It’s officially in beta, requires that Chrome is installed and is compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP with the Windows XPS Essentials Pack installed (but then, you really shouldn’t run XP on your computers anymore…).
The other tool Google is launching today is Google Cloud Printer for Windows, which is essentially a printer driver for Windows that lets you use Cloud Print just like any other printer that’s installed on your computer. With this, you can print to Cloud Print from any application on your computer.
With today’s update, Google also now makes it easier to share printers with anybody nearby by simply providing them with a link. You can manage access this way and also set limits for how many pages a given user can print per day (something schools will surely appreciate).
Sir Michael Moritz To Join Us At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco
The original journalist-turned-investor, Michael Moritz, will be joining us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next September.
In his over three-decades-long tech career, Moritz, who rose from humble beginnings, has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, written two books about Apple, consistently topped the Forbes Midas List, and has either sat on or currently sits on the boards of Stripe, LinkedIn, PayPal, Yahoo, Google, Kayak and Zappos among others.
Moritz’s leadership as Chairman at Sequoia has been marked by efficiency and focus. And the lucrative $25 million co-investment in Google with competitor Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Moritz saw the firm through some of the most major tectonic tech shifts of our time before he stepped away from day-to-day proceedings last year. At Disrupt SF, Moritz will be speaking about the latest shift — the personal economy.
Moritz joins other noted investors at Disrupt, including Kleiner’s John Doerr and Sequoia’s Douglas Leone. With founders and CEOs like Marc Benioff and Marissa Mayer, Disrupt SF 2013 is already set to have a stunning speaker lineup. And we still have more to announce in the coming weeks.
Disrupt SF takes over The San Francisco Design Concourse from September 7 to 11. Tickets are currently on sale here. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.
Michael Moritz
Sequoia Capital
Partner
Sir Michael Moritz is Chairman of Sequoia Capital where he has worked since 1986. Michael represented Sequoia in its investments in Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Flextronics, Kayak, Pure Digital and Zappos.com.
He has always had an eclectic set of investment interests and today represents Sequoia’s interests in Klarna, Green Dot, and Stripe (two banks and a payments company), LinkedIn (the world’s professional nework), Instacart (grocery delivery in an hour), PopSugar (the entertainment and fashion site for women), [24]7 (an outsourcing customer service company) and The Melt (a grilled cheese restaurant chain).
Before joining Sequoia, Michael worked as a correspondent for Time; wrote a couple of books, including the Little Kingdom, the first authoritative book about Apple’s early years; and co-founded Technologic Partners, the precursor of Venture Wire.
Researcher Reported iAd Workbench Hole Before Apple's Dev Center Went Dark, Here's What He Found
Apple’s developer site went dark unexpectedly last Thursday and remained dark straight through the weekend. The company revealed yesterday that it was because an “intruder” attempted to access personal information pertaining to Apple’s registered developers. While Apple continues to work on revamping the Dev Center’s security and bringing the whole thing back online, a 25-year-old Turkish security researcher named Ibrahim Balic thinks that it may have been because of him.
But was it?
Balic swears up and down that he’s no malicious hacker. Rather, he claims to be just a security buff who stumbled upon a way to access gobs of Apple user data, tried to warn the company about it, and made a (now private) video highlighting the security flaw in question when Apple wouldn’t respond. Because of Apple’s usual opacity, my multiple calls and emails have gone unanswered, so it’s nearly impossible to say for sure whether his poking around caused Apple to take action last week, but the timing definitely seems curious.
Let’s back up a minute. Balic is an avid bug hunter (he’s reported them to Facebook among others) and has filed a grand total of 13 bug reports to Apple since he first took an interest in the company on July 16. The one that gets most of the spotlight in his video seems to be Apple bug #14488816, which Balic reported on July 18 — the same day users first started reporting downtime for Apple’s Dev Center.
That little security issue is centered around Apple’s iAd Workbench, a recently launched tool that lets users craft and target iAd campaigns to better build hype around their iOS apps. Balic discovered that if you manipulated a request sent to the server that runs Workbench, it would allow you to try to add a new user to the account. From there you could try throwing in first names, last names — whatever really — and the server would then respond with a full name and email address. Once Balic understood the full scope of the problem, he (and this is where his rationale loses me a bit) wrote a Python script to scrape all the data he could find and showed some of it on YouTube.
And what of the Dev Center itself? On July 16 Balic did in fact file a bug report (#14461474) to Apple that dealt with the Dev Center’s vulnerability to a stored XSS attack. He said that it was technically possible to access user data by exploiting that issue, but he never attempted it. Instead, he claims he reported the problem and went off in search of the next big bug to report.
It’s too bad, though, that the video seemed so definitive: After showing off images of Apple’s downed Dev Center and the company’s official response, Balic then showed a slew of files that seem to contain full names and email addresses. It seems pretty damning, but Balic says that he never went after the Developer Center site directly, and all that user information he highlighted came from the iAd Workbench. Two separate bugs paved the way for one very confusing video.
Of course, he didn’t do a great job of explaining this. In a comment left in our original Dev Center hacking story, Balic pointed out that “one of those bugs have provided me access to users details etc” in reference to the iAd bug, and followed up by noting that “4 hours later from my final report Apple developer portal gas closed down and you know it still is.”
The poor framing of the comment made it seem as though he submitted that data leak bug report and Apple shut down the dev site shortly afterward, but his final bug report actually was filed hours later. He later added that neither the data of the 73 Apple employees nor the 100,000 subsequent data files he scraped had anything to do with that Developer Center exploit he reported on the 16th.
According to multiple files Balic sent to me, the data gleaned from the iAds issue is (thankfully) limited to names and email addresses. More worrying though is the idea that this particular bug could have affected more than just Apple’s developer community. An Apple representative told TechCrunch yesterday that only developer accounts could have been affected by the breach, but Balic insists that the issue he found returns regular email addresses and Apple IDs, too. There’s nothing encrypted about what he showed in the video — names and email addresses are rendered in plain text. I’ve contacted many of the users whose information appeared in the video but haven’t heard back yet, so we can’t confirm whether these people are developers or regular iTunes users, or if they’re just a bunch of random email addresses.
Throughout our conversation, Balic maintained that he was only ever trying to help Apple. When asked why he downloaded all that user data rather than simply reporting the bug, Balic says he just wanted to see how “deep” he could go. If he wanted to do ill, he says, he wouldn’t have reported everything he found. For what it’s worth, he also says he never attempted to reset anyone’s password — the farthest he went was to email one of the addresses he had discovered and ask if it was really the person’s Apple ID. Balic didn’t get a response.
Is it possible that Balic’s poking around caught Apple’s attention and prompted the company to take the developer site down? Yes. The iAd Workbench may fall under the same broad umbrella as the Dev Center, and the Add User functionality that once appeared in the iAd Workbench seems to have disappeared. Only people within Apple really know what’s going on, and they’re just not feeling very chatty at the moment; I’ll update this post if they respond.
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