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Three Top Microsoft Investors Allegedly Want To Boot Gates From The Company's Board
According to Reuters, three of Microsoft’s top 20 investors are making noise that Microsoft remove its founder and former CEO Bill Gates from its board of directors. Gates is currently chairman of Microsoft’s board.
The information is almost odd, and points at a potential blank slate for Microsoft. In the midst of a massive reorganization, current CEO Steve Ballmer is stepping down. If Gates were to transition away from the company as well, it would leave Microsoft with new leadership and serve as a pivotal moment in its history.
Microsoft is more than working to better align its internal teams and revamp its larger business model by moving away from selling software and towards vending both “devices” and “services.” Its early services efforts, such as Office 365 and Azure, have performed well, while its Surface project (the devices side of things) has flagged.
Why shift Gates? According to Reuters, the grumpy few feel that he might hold the company back from finding new direction.
Don’t think for a minute that Gates is about to let go of the reins gently. He’s been a fixture at Microsoft since its soul was first formed, and even though he has no intention of returning to the CEO position, I’ve seen little that would indicate that he wants to walk away from Microsoft altogether.
Also, if you are a Gates fan – and so very, very many of you are, as I’ve learned from your polite tweets – it doesn’t make sense to yank Gates from the board precisely when his guidance could be key to helping the company pick its next leader. People that won’t be: Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Steven Sinofsky, You, Me. Everyone else is pretty much up for speculation.
I’ll just say that with the calming of ValueAct, I don’t see who could cause enough ruckus to manage a Gates exit, especially at this time of intentional turmoil. A final point: ValueAct controls around 0.8 percent of Microsoft. Gates: 4.5 percent. Ballmer has around 4 percent. That combined is a hefty chunk of the equity. Gates won’t have to leave if he doesn’t want to.
Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble
Disrupt Alum Monsieur Launches Kickstarter Campaign For Its Robo-Bartender
If the prevailing wisdom of years past were any indication, we should have been up to our necks in sassy, autonomous robot servants a decade ago. While I wait for someone to develop a Rosie to cater to my every whim, the folks behind the Monsieur robotic bartender that took the stage at Disrupt SF 2013, have just recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring its drink-slinging machine to market.
The Monsieur itself is easy enough to use — an Android tablet is nestled within that front facade to give users the ability to choose from a variety of drinks from the catalog (which can also be expanded through additional themes or user recipes). In the event you run low of potables, the Monsieur can also fire off an email or text message to keep the owner abreast of drink levels so they can pop off for a refill. And, because I know you were wondering, you can crank up the strength of your drink using a strength meter — dial it up all the way and there’s a distinct possibility you won’t be able to see straight for much longer.
Now, all that is just peachy, but there’s a much bigger question to tackle here: How do these drinks actually taste? Your mileage is naturally going to vary, but I fixed myself a Screwdriver backstage at Disrupt with the Boss level set smack in the middle and came away rather pleased with the outcome. Over time the Monsieur will also grow accustomed to the nuances of your drinking habits — it can detect when you get home from work and offer you a double, for instance, and it’ll eventually learn how strong you like certain drinks.
While the version that the Monsieur team demoed onstage was a larger model meant for bars, restaurants, and other sizable venues, the big addition today is a Mini version with no built-in tablet and four peristaltic pumps rather than the customary eight. That means you’re going to have to be a bit more judicious with the liquor bottles you load into the thing, though the Monsieur itself will offer recommendations based on what sort of drink theme you’ve chosen. It’s ostensibly meant for home use, and while I’m sure there’s some satisfaction to be had in pouring your own drink at the end of a long day, the ability to remotely order a drink from the Monsieur partner app may ultimately win over some of the lazies among you.
Then again, the price tag may prove to be a bit too steep: early backers can lay claim to a Mini model for $1,499, while the big one can set up in your saloon for $2,299.
Senior Facebook, Netflix Scientist Joins Identified To Help It Fix Professional Search, Take On LinkedIn
This summer, Identified pulled back the curtain on a new artificial intelligence technology, called “SYMAN,” which it developed to help organize and clean the swaths of unstructured professional data that today lives on the Web. In doing so, the startup moved away from its original focus — a kind of Facebook data-driven “Klout score for professionals” — essentially admitting that if it were going to give job seekers and companies a better way to connect and find talent, it would have to address the elephant in the room: Data.
To deliver a quality search or analytics product that could compete with LinkedIn (and actually produce some actionable insight), Identified teamed up with a group of former LinkedIn data scientists to help clean social media data with SYMAN and then productize it to enable customers to power their recruiting, human capital management, CRM and others. After beginning its mining and cleaning operation with Facebook’s professional data, the startup now has the help of one of the lead data scientists at Facebook, whose job it was to craft strategy around that very dataset.
Today, the company officially announced the hiring of Mohammad Sabah, the former Manager of Data Science and Analytics at Facebook, who will be joining Identified to lead its data science and engineering team as “Chief Data Officer.” At Facebook, Sabah led data science and analytics for the “Identity Team” at Facebook, where he was responsible for building the team and developing strategy for key products like Timeline, Profile Completeness and Privacy.
Essentially, the Identity Team owns and cultivates Facebook’s most valuable asset: Your personal data — and the data generated by the 1.2 billion people (and their relationships) on its platform. Sabah and his team tackled the challenges of deciding what are the most relevant stories that should be surfaced in your Facebook profile’s Timeline and figuring out ways to encourage Facebook users to complete their profiles, increase accuracy of those profiles and so on.
Before joining Facebook, he was a principal data scientist and engineer at Netflix, the Rubicon Project and Yahoo, where he focused on large-scale machine learning algorithms to improve personalization, search, click prediction and keyword recommendation — among other things.
Identified began its data mining by targeting the healthcare industry (and jobs in medical fields) in particular, and Sabah joins Identified to help develop the company’s patent-pending tech, build a team of data scientists around it and help apply it to new industries.
Prior to launching SYMAN earlier this summer, the company had remained fairly quiet over the last nine months as it pivoted in this new direction and began hiring a team of data scientists that would help lead the way. While Facebook may not seem like the go-to source for professional data (usually, that’s LinkedIn’s expertise), the co-founders point out that its dataset is actually five-times the size of LinkedIn but far less complete — and structured. Plus, it helps that there are over one billion people using the social network today.
So, essentially, the data architecture they’ve developed since enables machines to more quickly draw inferences about Facebook’s data entries based on context, natural language and a host of other signals. Knowing that someone has listed their title as “Analyst” on Facebook isn’t much good to a recruiter, however, if, by digging into context and related data, SYMAN can help hiring managers deduce that the person is actually a “Systems Analyst” at Salesforce, then you have something recruiters would probably be willing to pay for.
Identified began testing SYMAN with around 30 companies, including enterprise health clients like Kaiser Permanente, but is now in the process of expanding to target other industries — beginning with consumer goods — and its list of clients has grown to 58 since May. The company has raised $22.5 million to date from investors like VantagePoint Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and others.
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