Salary Database Shows The Highs And Lows Of Silicon Valley Pay

From Netflix managers earning over $500,000 a year to a photographer at Airbnb making $22 an hour, a new database highlights who earns what in the tech industry.

Flickr / Integra Global Solutions / Via Flickr: integra-global-solutions

Visa Explorer, a database of tech worker pay unveiled last week, reveals the highs and lows of the American technology industry: a gilded class of managers and programmers earning salaries placing them comfortably among the country's top 5%, alongside a vast pool of middle-class coders at giant consultancies and outsourcing firms.

The pay transparency site, utilizing data from millions of corporate requests to sponsor foreign worker visas, gives a detailed look at high-end salaries in Silicon Valley's best-known companies. The requests, known as Labor Condition Applications (LCAs), must be filed to the U.S. Department of Labor before a foreign worker applies for their visa.

Unsurprisingly, some of the highest salaries were posted by some of the world's largest and most profitable companies. A position for vice president in engineering at Apple is listed at $406,000; its vice president of core operating systems is listed as making $390,000. In 2012, a senior vice president for retail was listed as making $800,000. Apple declined to comment on employee compensation.

At Microsoft, meanwhile, executive salaries (titles like senior manager of data and analytics, director of public relations, principal software engineer, and senior principal engagement manager) are listed at around $200,000, with the Latin America lead for enterprise and partner groups making $235,000. Microsoft declined to comment.

But Netflix, which made a $267 million profit on $5.5 billion in revenue for 2014, appears to pay its people as well — if not better — than many much more profitable companies. Its director of advertising for Europe is listed as earning a base salary of $560,000, its senior counsel for original film is listed as making $465,000, and its Latin America director for digital marketing is listed at $425,000 a year.

In fact, the median pay for the 88 foreign workers Netflix has applied to hire in 2015 is $260,000, more than double the $112,000 median pay Apple has listed on its 681 visa filings so far this year.

A representative for Netflix wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News that top salaries are part of the company's "high-performance culture."

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Pay was also generous at the companies best known for their creative use of on-demand contractors instead of employees. At Uber, the head of global talent acquisition was set to earn $250,000, and in 2012, a chief operating officer was listed with a salary of $350,000. Airbnb planned a salary of $185,000 for its global head of advertising, while Homejoy — which rumors suggest could soon be purchased by rival on-demand cleaning service company Handy — wanted to pay both its vice president of operations and its chief growth officer $200,000 in 2015. Uber and Homejoy declined to comment; Airbnb did not respond to request for comment.

It's not all milk and honey in the so-called sharing economy, though: Airbnb, according to an LCA filing, sought to sponsor a foreign photographer to work at $22 per hour. That would work out to just over $42,000 a year, based on 40-hour work weeks.

But while all these high-paying companies represent the public face of the technology industry, plenty of behind-the-scenes work is done at much more earthly pay rates.

Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, two Indian outsourcing firms, topped the list of companies applying to sponsor employees to work in the U.S. via H-1B visas, and seem to be hiring heavily in the United States to satisfy their customers. The Visa Explorer database lists Infosys as filing 95,947 LCAs since 2001, and Tata 48,753, with the jobs being primarily technical in nature.

But the two companies appear to be paying well below their Silicon Valley counterparts. Among the 9,300 jobs Tata has filed LCAs for in 2015, the median salary is just over $66,000, while at Infosys, the median is $76,000. Microsoft, which sponsors more H-1B visas than any other U.S. tech company, listed a median salary of $102,000 on the 1,100 LCAs filed so far this year.

An Infosys spokesperson said the company complies with all U.S. laws and regulations when sponsoring foreign workers, including "paying the higher of the prevailing or actual wages for the occupations and locations involved, while offering health insurance, bonuses and other fringe benefits based on an employee's position within the company."

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Inside Formation 8's Secret Strategy To Invest In Hardware

The venture capital firm Formation 8 wants to raise $100 million to invest in hardware makers. BuzzFeed News obtained a confidential slide presentation about the new fund.

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Drones. Robots. Wearable devices. Internet-connected household appliances.

These technologies are making the partners of venture capital firm Formation 8 — including Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data mining giant Palantir — see dollar signs.

Formation 8 disclosed last week that it is seeking to raise up to $100 million for a fund focused exclusively on hardware. It has expanded on this new strategy in a confidential slide presentation for investors that was obtained by BuzzFeed News and is published in full below.

The fund, which Formation 8 calls the "world's first" dedicated to backing hardware makers, plans to make early-stage investments in startups in the United States, Israel and Asia, according to the presentation. Its focus will be the "connected world and the Internet of Things," including 3D printing, semiconductors, autos and domestic gadgets.

The fund is seeking a minimum of $75 million in capital, according to the presentation, which is dated March 2015. It initially plans to invest between $1.5 million and $3 million in seed or Series A deals.

Formation 8 is banking on its connections in Silicon Valley and Asia. Its founders include Lonsdale, a Silicon Valley billionaire, and Brian Koo, a member of the powerful Korean family behind the LG conglomerate.

The firm's Asian connections are particularly important in helping manufacture and distribute hardware, the slide presentation argues, listing Asian companies like Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba among its "mission-critical partners."

Formation 8 wants investors to think its hardware strategy is a contrarian play. The presentation claims that there are more than 300 startup incubators focused on software, but only 5 focused on hardware.

While the venture capital firm was founded only in 2011, it is hoping investors will view it as a seasoned expert in hardware. It hit a prominent home run with early investments in Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker that was bought by Facebook for $2 billion last year.

"Hardware companies are traditionally very hard to build and startups, especially, face unique challenges," the presentation says. "We believe the time is ripe to focus in depth on the intersection of hardware, software and services."

The hardware fund will be led by Lior Susan, who joined Formation 8 this year. He was previously the general partner of LabIX, a hardware investment program at the Singapore-based manufacturing services company Flextronics, and is a reservist of an Israeli military special forces unit, according to his bio.

Flextronics itself is an investor in the Formation 8 hardware fund, according to a person briefed on the matter.

A Formation 8 spokesman declined to comment on the confidential presentation.

Check out the slides below.

Formation 8

Formation 8

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Bloomberg Chairman Votes To Keep UNC Building Named After Ku Klux Klan Leader

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters

The chairman of Bloomberg L.P., Peter Grauer, voted today against changing the name of a building on the campus of the University of North Carolina that was named after a one-time Ku Klux Klan leader.

Grauer, who has chaired the board of the media giant since 2001, voted against a proposal to change the name of Saunders Hall, whose namesake, William Saunders, is recognized by the university to have been a significant Ku Klux Klan organizer. The proposal passed 10-3, and the building will be renamed "Carolina Hall."

Student activists at UNC had pushed heavily for the name change, saying the hall's name contributed to a culture of racism on campus. They protested at a March board meeting with signs that said "Black Lives Matter" and "Kick Out the KKK," according to the Raleigh News Observer. A wide swath of the student body had supported the name change.

William L. Saunders "graduated from UNC in 1854 and then practiced law in Salisbury, North Carolina. During the Civil War, he served as a colonel and was wounded in two battles," says a bio on UNC's own website. "In 1869-1870, he became known as the chief organizer of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina and Chapel Hill."

Neither Grauer nor a representative for Bloomberg L.P. responded to a request for comment.

Even trustees who eventually voted for the name changes seemed unimpressed by the attention paid to the issue. One who voted in favor, Alston Gardner, told students now was the time to "direct your passion on more substantial issues,” the News Observer reported, such as the “sorry state of black men" at the university.

College Admissions And The Business Of Making Asian Kids Less "Asian"

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One of Brian Taylor's clients at Ivy Coach, an elite college admissions counseling firm, was a talented cellist. He loved the instrument so much that he sometimes played it for fun on the street, collecting tips. But when it came time to apply for college, Taylor said, "There was no mention of the cello on his college application. Not one."

Ivy Coach cut out the cello for one reason: because the client was Chinese-American. "He checked just about every proverbial box we always discourage our students from checking," Taylor said: he played a string instrument, ran track, and was a competitive mathlete. Instead of those pastimes, Ivy Coach encouraged the boy to focus his application on his passion for government, which Taylor thought would buck against stereotypes. He was accepted to several Ivy League schools.

After a coalition of 64 Asian-American groups filed a federal complaint earlier this month alleging Harvard’s admissions process discriminated against Asians, the advice of counselors like Taylor has particular resonance. Among the many professionals who charge thousands of dollars — sometimes tens of thousands — to help students get into Harvard and other elite colleges, there's a common refrain: The best way to get an Asian kid into an Ivy League school is to make them seem less “Asian."

There's an entire cottage industry, in fact, made up of pricy college counselors who help Asian applicants overcome pervasive and damaging stereotypes and a brutally competitive admissions process that some say discriminates against Asian candidates. One major company has even advised candidates not to emphasize their family's immigrant roots during the application process.

The complaint against Harvard, filed earlier this month, alleged the school stacks the deck against Asian and Asian-American applicants, creating artificial quotas that limit the percentage of Asian students and effectively require Asians to notch higher grades and test scores to be admitted. It cited a study that found Asian-Americans applying to elite schools must score 140 points higher than white applicants on their SATs to be on equal footing, and 450 points higher than a black applicant.

It also argued that affirmative action policies, which favor black and Latino applicants, lead to discrimination against Asians and should be ended; a similar lawsuit last year was backed by a prominent anti-affirmative-action activist. A number of prominent Asian-American groups have opposed the complaint and are strong supporters of affirmative action.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit from earlier this year, Harvard denied all of the allegations of discrimination, saying it used a holistic admissions process that included race, and test scores, as just two of many factors in an incredibly competitive admissions process.

Most educational experts agree that both the lawsuit and federal complaint are unlikely to go anywhere; in a wide-ranging admissions process that accepts just 5% of 37,000 applicants, it is nearly impossible to prove that a particular student deserved acceptance over another. Others have pointed to the fact that Asians are already dramatically overrepresented in Harvard's class, and have seen admissions rates climb: 21% of Harvard students identify as Asian, compared with 17% in 2004. As a whole, Asians make up just 6% of the population.

The merits of the suit and its attacks on affirmative action policies will be debated both in the courtroom and among the mosaic of activist groups focussed on fairness in college admissions. But among many of the the people paid big money by college applicants for help and advice, the barriers for Asian applicants are clear.

“A lot of our work is finding strategic ways for our Indian or Asian clients to break the stereotypes,” said Mimi Doe, who runs Top Tier Admissions, one of the country's most prestigious — and most expensive — college admissions consulting companies. Half of her clients, she said, are of Asian descent, and struggle with ethnic and cultural assumptions that were long ago jettisoned when evaluating white applicants.

“We set out to help our Indian and Asian candidates who do seem to fall into these typical robotic, soulless stereotypes to zero in on areas that will set them apart,” Doe said. Top Tier's services can run upwards of $40,000 for students who begin in middle school.

College admissions coaching and counseling are enormously popular among Asian-Americans. At California's Harvard Square 2 Academy, among the country's largest college admissions companies, 99% of the company's 3,000 students are Asian, said Ann Lee, the company's founder. HS2 Academy is in the process of opening a Hong Kong location, it said.

Another well-publicized company, ThinkTank Learning, has 12 locations in California and two in China; on its Chinese language blog, one post says, "If you are Asian, it may not be an advantage anymore to write your personal statement on your Asian immigrant upbringing, you might even want to strategize to change your last name to increase your odds of admission."

"A good portion of our students are Asian, and we tell them right up front, ‘You're going to face discrimination,’” said Taylor, the director of Ivy Coach. “Our [clients] aren’t mathletes, they don't play the violin if they don't love it, and Mommy's not forcing them. We would rather them use those hours that they’d be playing the violin to do something that every Asian applicant isn’t doing.”

Some advisors disagree with the need to spin an application in a way that downplays ethnic or cultural backgrounds. Kavita Mehta, an admissions consultant based in Mumbai, said she doesn't take stereotypes into consideration when she works with her clients, who are mostly Indian. "When it comes to trying to 'game the system,' we've always found that that backfires," Metha said. "Passion for whatever you do comes through. It’s best to go in with the strongest, most consistent application — and that’s the one you’re putting in truthfully."

But while all applicants must do their best to stand out from the crowd in elite college admissions, for Asians, professionals say, the fight is different.

White applicants are judged not against their racial groups but against more nuanced subsets, said Pamela Ellis, the founder of college admissions coaching firm Compass Education Strategies. For white students, Ellis said, “It’s not racial. It might be be socioeconomic, for example. You have to avoid a clichéd essay about the safari you went on.”

But where white students face clichés, Asians must fight against racist stereotypes — pervasive cultural ideas that all Asians are the same, pursue similar activities, and lack creativity and passion.

Doe said she and Top Tier Admissions urge Asian students, some of whom she counsels beginning in eighth or ninth grade, to avoid focusing on science and math "unless they're really good at it" and instead turn toward something like literature. It's important, Doe said, for Asian applicants to "be authentic and do what they love." But also important: "They've got to break out of those stereotypes."

"By all means, continue to love music, if you love music," Doe said, "That doesn’t mean you have to demonstrate your love of music in all of your applications, if it means you're going to look like every other Asian applicant."

One Asian applicant, Doe said, had a "zillion" math awards and a love of computer science. But he used his application essay to talk about his interest in classics, including a classics club he had started for inner-city children, and got into a slew of top-tier schools.

The federal complaint from earlier this month hinges in large part on the role of stereotypes that Doe and others guide their clients to avoid. Despite Asian students' academic achievements, the complaint says, "racial biases, often coupled with a lack of understanding of Asian cultures, have plagued the college admissions process ... admissions officers treat Asians as a monolithic block and denigrate these applicants as lacking creativity, critical thinking, leadership skills, and risk-taking."

CollegeConfidential.com, the nexus of college admissions discussion for stressed-out high school students, is flooded with posts by students who worry they are "too Asian" and are searching for advice about how to "stand out," whether they should quit dragon dancing in to avoid stereotypes, and even how to disguise their Asian last names.

"How to become 'less Asian'?" one poster, Yakisoba, asked in a College Confidential forum. "I feel that as I grow older and older, I am becoming more inclined to stick with Asian stereotypes and cultures," wrote the poster, who was just a freshman in high school. "Although I'm in the beginning of high school and have plenty of opportunities to explore new [extracurriculars], I feel like I need to correct this behavior soon, or else it will be too late come college application time."

Among the advice given to Yakisoba: Don't write essays "about your Asian heritage," try sports besides tae kwon do, and maybe start playing the drums instead of the violin.

Jawbone Sues Fitbit For Stealing Employees And Trade Secrets

As the wearable activity tracker market becomes increasingly crowded, Jawbone says Fitbit is out to “decimate” it.

The Flex by Fitbit is presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Feb. 24, 2014.

Josep Lago / Getty Images

In a lawsuit filed today, Jawbone has accused Fitbit — its main rival and the world's leading activity tracker company — of plundering its employees and trade secrets as Fitbit prepares to go public.

The suit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco, alleges that this year alone, Fitbit recruiters tried to poach about 30% of Jawbone's employees and hired at least five of them. According to the suit, these workers deliberately gathered confidential information about Jawbone and brought it to Fitbit, violating Jawbone's policies. An unnamed Fitbit recruiter is quoted in the lawsuit as saying, "Fitbit's objective is to decimate Jawbone."

The "stolen files," the lawsuit alleges, "are the informational equivalent of a gold mine for Fitbit, as they provide an intricate roadmap into the core of Jawbone's business." Jawbone is accusing Fitbit of stealing information about product updates and new technologies rather than investing in building new features itself.

Jawbone is seeking unspecified compensatory, punitive, exemplary, and other damages from Fitbit and the five employees, as well as injunctive relief to prevent the employees from disclosing any additional Jawbone trade secrets and Fitbit from using them.

One accused employee is Ana Rosario, who started in Jawbone's design and user researcher/customer experience department in May 2014. She interviewed for a position as a senior user experience researcher at Fitbit on April 16, 2015, the lawsuit alleges, and four days later, before announcing that she planned to leave, met with co-workers to discuss Jawbone's direction and product designs and prototypes. Rosario then downloaded onto her personal computer a confidential presentation about Jawbone's current and future products — the company's so-called "Playbook for the Future" — in violation of company policy, the lawsuit alleges, before giving notice April 22.

Rosario is said to have been poached by Katherine Mogal, who began at Jawbone in August 2013 as director of marketing and customer experience insights before joining Fitbit in March 2015 as head of user experience research. She is also named in the suit, as are Patrick Narron, Patricio Romano, and Rong Zhang.

Narron, a staff audio engineer, allegedly sent confidential company information to his personal email less than a week before he left Jawbone for Fitbit. Romano, a product design engineer, allegedly saved Jawbone files onto a USB drive, sent them to a personal email, and wiped the footprints of his activity from his computer, all before he gave notice at Jawbone to take a job at Fitbit. Zhang, a cost accounting manager and supply chain manager, allegedly saved information onto a USB drive, resigned from Jawbone the next day, and joined Fitbit in April.

The lawsuit comes just weeks after Fitbit filed for an initial public offering, and it is unclear how it will affect those plans. The company is the dominant player in the wireless activity tracker market, with $745 million in revenue and nearly 11 million devices sold last year. But it acknowledged in its IPO filing that it shares the market with a growing number of competitors, including Jawbone and Apple.

On the other hand, Jawbone, which has raised about $700 million and is reportedly valued at about $3 billion, has struggled with profitability, paying off its debts, and raising funding. Its newly released Up3, a wristband health tracker, has received mixed reviews. The global contract manufacturer Flextronics sued it last year for breach of contract, alleging that "Jawbone's financial condition is perilous and currently insufficient to pay its debts." (Fortune reported that the suit was quickly settled.) It took out a $300 million loan in February from BlackRock, a move that observers told Bloomberg View is a bit of a lifeline since the company has struggled to sell venture shares.

In response to the allegations, a Fitbit spokesperson said, "As the pioneer and leader in the connected health and fitness market, Fitbit has no need to take information from Jawbone or any other company. Since Fitbit's start in 2007, our employees have developed and delivered innovative product offerings to empower our customers to lead healthier, more active lives. We are unaware of any confidential or proprietary information of Jawbone in our possession and we intend to vigorously defend against these allegations."

Jawbone referred media inquiries to its attorneys.

Google Unveils Android Pay, A Revamped Google Wallet

Announced on the heels of Apple Pay at Google’s annual developers’ conference, the tap-to-pay service will be available at 700,000 stores.

At today's I/O conference, Google Vice President of Engineering Dave Burke unveiled Android Pay, Google's new in-app and tap-to-pay mobile payments service. Payments will employ "near-field communication," or NFC, to allow users to pay for goods and services with a preloaded credit card by simply placing their phones near a merchant terminal.

Burke said that Android Pay will be available in over 700,000 stores, including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and McDonald's locations, in addition working within apps such as GrubHub, Uber, and Groupon. Payments can also be authorized with a user's fingerprint. At I/O, Burke said Payments would be available "soon."

Burke said Pay "builds on work we did in previous Android releases," and indeed, Google first rolled out a payments service, then called Google Wallet, in 2011. But it never took off, as it wasn't available in many stores and a number of users didn't even realize they could make payments with their phone. Google recently acquired technology assets from SoftCard, formerly known as Isis, a mobile payments company founded by a consortium of wireless carriers. At the same time, Google made a deal with carriers to have Google Wallet pre-installed on phones. Google also has deals with the major credit card networks — American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa — to support Android Pay.

Right now, Apple Pay is the clear leader in mobile payments from consumers to merchants. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in January that Apple Pay does $2 out of every $3 of contactless payments for MasterCard, American Express, and Visa. It has also successfully signed up major banks and merchants like Best Buy, Whole Foods, McDonald's and is available at nearly 700,000 merchant locations, Tim Cook said in March.

But it's still a relatively small market. Forrester Research estimated that there were $52 billion of mobile payments in 2014, which includes in-person payments, payments done through mobile apps remotely, and peer to payments like Venmo). 22 percent of cell phone owners made at least one mobile payment in 2014, and a third of cell phone users between aged 18 and 29 did, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

The main reason people don't use mobile payments, according to the Federal Reserve, is that they're not noticeably more convenient than credit or debit cards. 75 percent of the respondents in the Fed survey said that it was easier to pay with credit or debit cards, and 59 percent said they were concerned about the security of mobile payments. Like with Apple Pay, Android Pay will not convey a credit card number to the merchant, and will instead receive what's known as a unique token for each transaction.

Southern California Tells Airbnb: You Can't Stay Here

A growing number of smaller communities around Los Angeles have voted to ban short-term rentals and kick Airbnb to the curb. West Hollywood could be next.

Via airbnb.com

With the height of summer getaway season fast approaching, a growing number of Southern California communities have shown Airbnb the door. In recent months, city councils from Orange County coastal enclaves to the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica have repeatedly voted to ban short-term rentals and, as a result, the use of Airbnb to list a property.

Just last week, the city of Laguna Beach passed a 45-day emergency ordinance imposing a moratorium on short-term rentals in the affluent coastal town, after which it will consider an all-out ban. One problem, Laguna Beach Mayor Pro Tem Steve Dicterow told BuzzFeed News, is that while currently only 60 properties in town have the proper permit for short-term rentals, which requires a business license and paying an occupancy tax, there are 200 properties listed on home sharing websites that do not. But an even bigger concern is the quality-of-life complaints made to the city regarding these properties.

"It needs some regulation because there have just been too many anecdotal stories of people not treating the neighbors well, being loud, having late, noisy parties, parking illegally in places, being rude to people, things of that nature," Dicterow said.

"These are in a residential neighborhood, not in a commercial or hotel district. The primary concern we have is that there have been a proliferation of these short-term rentals because of social media and the various websites that advertise these properties. Of course I want to collect the tax, but our primary concern is that residents who live there full-time can have the quiet enjoyment of the neighborhood to which they're entitled. Laguna is a small town."

The Laguna Beach decision comes just a week after the Santa Monica City Council approved a permanent ban on short-term rentals, or those fewer than 30 days. Despite the fact that the decision spurred a protest organized by Airbnb outside of the City Council, local legislators said complaints of Airbnb causing an affordable housing shortage in Santa Monica were too forceful to ignore.

"When we in Santa Monica found that over 1,000 dwelling units that should be homes to permanent residents had been converted instead to de facto hotel rooms, we felt we had to act, and we all felt the same way about it," Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown said at the meeting. The rules passed allow for "true" home sharing, the LA Times reported, meaning short-term rentals when the owner is present, pays applicable taxes, and is appropriately licensed.

"Many cities in California are reviewing proposals to enable hosts to share their homes. We are continuing to highlight the importance of fair rules with leaders throughout Southern California," an Airbnb spokesperson said. "We are heartened that Santa Monica amended their short term rental ban to authorize home sharing, and we are hopeful they will revisit unnecessary and troubling restrictions in the near future."

Criticism of Airbnb's effects on the supply of affordable housing has been growing in Los Angeles, New York, and most recently San Francisco, where a report released earlier this month found that between 925 and 1,960 affordable housing units have remained vacant so that they can be rented out on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites like VRBO and HomeAway.

In the case of West Hollywood, the most recent municipality weighing an outright ban on short-term rentals, the issue is not affordable housing, but concerns over noise, safety, and renters throwing parties, like the one that recently did major damage to a property in Calgary, Alberta.

"We really focused on the inability to uphold the quality of life for existing tenants," West Hollywood Mayor Pro Tempore Laura Meister told BuzzFeed News. "We have a very dense city here, and we focused on every type of home — single family, apartment. Based on the feedback from the community, they couldn't find it was a good fit. A lot of questions and concerns related to noise, sharing of secured access, multiple tenants that would be transient, questions about parking, how these individuals that would be staying for short terms would take over all of the guest spots."

To investigate, the West Hollywood City Council formed a seven-month-long community involvement initiative called the Shared Economy Task Force that talked to residents, local businesses, and a representative from Airbnb about the possibility of allowing for rentals that were shorter than 30 days. In the end, it recommended the city continue its prohibition of short-term rentals, and will present a clarification of its zoning code laws — violations of which can result in a range of penalties, from a $200 fine to a misdemeanor charge — at the July City Council meeting, where it will likely go into effect 30 days later. Meister said Airbnb was "disappointed" with the task force's findings.

"There were a lot of residents that were very concerned because they already had neighbors using short-term rentals and they were having parties," Genevieve Morrill, president of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and a member of the task force, told BuzzFeed News.

"Other people were saying it helped us out and we get to travel by doing that, but it just seemed that even with looking at other cities, we are too dense. There are too many apartment owners and renters. We also have rent control, so there was also concern about new apartments that were being built being used by tenants to rent them out, not by the landlords, and so we didn't want to encourage it."

Ultimately, Morrill said, "it just didn't seem to work for our city. Although we're a destination as well for tourism, I think we have plenty of hotels in the market."

Owner Of Spam Buys Organic Hot Dog Maker Applegate For $775 Million

Spam maker Hormel will pay $775 million to add natural and organic brand Applegate to its huge portfolio of food products

Gbh007 / Getty Images

Natural and organic hot dog maker Applegate is becoming a subsidiary of Hormel--the Minnesota-based company that also owns Spam, Jennie-O turkey, Muscle Milk, and Skippy peanut butter.

Hormel is the latest company to acknowledge consumer demand a higher standard of meat. Restaurant chains like Chipotle and McDonald's and even mega-retailer Walmart are trying to reduce the use of antibiotics in meat, for instance. Meanwhile, more grocery stores are stocking their shelves with such items to compete with retailers like Whole Foods.

Natural foods is still a weakness for Hormel, which expects to make more than $9.7 billion in sales this year. Yet these sustainably-raised products are quickly gaining mainstream momentum, and Hormel is betting that this will translate to people buying a lot more organic bacon, hot dogs, sausages, and deli meats.

The $775 million deal will help New Jersey-based Applegate get more items into traditional grocery outlets (versus specialty food stores), and possibly even start selling its meats to foodservice operators, where it currently does not do any business. It "provides us with a much more meaningful position in the natural and organic space," Hormel CEO Jeff Ettinger said during a conference call on Wednesday.

He expects Applegate's sales will continue to grow in the double digits annually, a faster rate than Hormel's as demand for responsibly raised meat rises. The brand estimates it will make just $340 million in 2015.

About 70% of Applegate's products are "natural" (which the company defines as hormone-free, antibiotic-free, free of artificial ingredients, and starting July GMO-free as well) and 30% are organic.

What 'natural' and 'organic' mean at Applegate

Via applegate.com

Applegate works with 1,800 farms and makes over 150 products. It also happens to be the number one producer in niche categories like natural and organic sliced deli meat, hot dogs, bacon, dinner sausage, frozen breaded chicken, and frozen breakfast sausage. It is also responsible for the "cleaner wiener" and "peace of meat" messages you may have seen on Twitter.

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McDonald's Will Toast Its Buns For Five More Seconds

The burger chain says it is “recommitting to hotter, tastier food,” as part of a turnaround effort. It starts with warmer bread.

McDonald's

McDonald's is on a mission to get its business back in shape, and it's finally taking another look at its food. Chief executive Steve Easterbrook said at a conference Wednesday morning that as the company makes organizational changes--which were the focus of the new CEO's comments about the turnaround earlier this month--"At a more fundamental level we are recommitting to hotter, tastier food across the menu."

With the burgers, McDonald's will change "the way we sear and then grill our beef so the patties come off juicier," Easterbrook said.

The bread will get some more attention too. A burger bun at McDonald's may be impossibly smooth and round, but it may also seem light, fluffy, almost unremarkable. The company will start having restaurants toast them five seconds longer, which will make them 15 degrees warmer. It may even add some texture and toasty flavor.

"It's the little things that add up to a big difference for our customers," said Easterbrook.

The issue of toasting has come up at McDonald's before. In the 1990s, when the chain was growing rapidly, it stopped toasting the buns altogether, and switched to microwaving its burgers to improve speed. The decline in quality made no one happy. "Operators have complained that consumers feel the untoasted buns are too chewy. Moreover, toasting keeps condiments in place and enhances the taste," the Chicago Tribune reported.

So in 1997, it started requiring new restaurants to install toasting equipment, at a cost of about $7,000 per store. The improvements were part of a new production system it called Made for You, which promised customers that their burgers would be freshly made to order.

The complication that arises from any toasting of buns, of course, is that it increases the risk of burning them, even if the equipment is set on a timer. Hopefully, McDonald's kitchens will avoid situations like these.

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AOL Chief To Get $59 Million Bonus For Selling The Company

Tim Armstrong stands to receive “Founders’ Incentive Reward” for orchestrating the Verizon deal. He also gets access to the Verizon corporate jet.

Brian Ach / Getty Images

AOL's deal to sell itself to Verizon for $4.4 billion will enrich CEO Tim Armstrong even more than previously thought.

Armstrong is set to receive a "Founders' Incentive Reward" when the merger closes, the company said in an SEC filing today, a package that includes restricted stock worth 1.5% of AOL's market capitalization. At today's stock price, the award would be worth about $59 million.

In addition, the filing said, Armstrong will be able to use the Verizon corporate jet for business travel.

Armstrong stands to get half of the bonus package three years after the merger is completed, followed by the other half a year later. Starting in 2016, he will be eligible for awards of up to $3 million worth of Verizon stock.

That's on top of the windfall Armstrong is getting through his personal ownership of AOL stock and options. At the time of the deal, Armstrong owned or controlled 6.7% of AOL's shares, with a market value of $280 million.

Much of that was in the form of options and other awards he was given for his service as CEO. His direct ownership of stock, worth about $60 million at the price of the deal, came from his investing over $20 million of his own money to buy shares over the years.

The filing also shed light on the path leading up to the acquisition deal.

Before deciding to sell itself to Verizon, AOL considered striking a joint venture with the telecom giant. Those talks, starting late last year, continued until April, when Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam suggested that Verizon instead buy AOL outright.

AOL also considered spinning off certain of its "brand assets," a portfolio that includes TechCrunch, Engadget, and The Huffington Post, but ultimately decided against that idea.

Verizon wasn't the only suitor to approach AOL about a possible deal. AOL also fielded interest from two other companies and a private equity firm, according to the filing, which did not identify the rival suitors.

The seeds of the Verizon-AOL deal were sown at the annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, hosted by the investment bank Allen & Company. At the conference, which draws power players from media and technology, Armstrong and McAdam "met and discussed ongoing and emerging trends in their respective industries," the filing says.

At the Sun Valley confab, reporters staked out a meeting between Armstrong and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who is also a former Google colleague of the AOL chief. Some speculated that the two could be planting the seeds of a merger between their companies, one that has been rumored or called for at least eight times since 2008.

LINK: AOL Chief’s Stake In Company Now Worth $280 Million

LINK: Verizon Likely To Retain TechCrunch And Engadget

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Replace "Millennial" With "Snake People" Using This Perfect Chrome Extension

“For Snake People, A Generational Divide.”

You know that wrathful feeling you get when you see yet another article making broad, sweeping generalizations about so-called "Millennials"?

Time Inc. / Via wordpress.com

Curb your angry, eye-rolling urges with this delightful Chrome extension that replaces the M-word with..."Snake People."

Via chrome.google.com

Revisit Google results:

Via google.com

What does Snapchat's CEO think about this generation?

Via bloomberg.com

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Android Auto Hits The Road In Hyundai's New Sonata

The 2015 Sonata is the first car to ever be manufactured with Android Auto built into it.

BuzzFeed News

Two years ago, after fielding a number of inbound requests from automobile manufacturers, Google embarked on an effort to bring its Android mobile operating system to the car. Hoping to better understand how people use their phones while driving, Google outfitted the cars of some of its employees with cameras and asked them to diary their in-car phone usage. The results of that study informed what would ultimately become Android Auto. They were also terrifying.

"We were like, holy crap, people are doing really unsafe things in their cars," Andrew Brenner, lead product manager of Android Auto, told BuzzFeed News. "It gave us a clear understanding of what we wanted to do from the outset: Make it easier to give people the digital experience they crave in their cars, but do it in a safer way."

Google launched Android Auto in March of this year with an eye toward offering a safer in-car smartphone experience — and pushing its Android OS another step closer toward ubiquity. Now, just a few months later, it's partnered with Hyundai to build Android Auto into the 2015 Sonata.

The 2015 Sonata is the first car to ever be manufactured with Android Auto built into it. And after a weeklong test drive, it's not hard to see why Google chose it. The car is outfitted with a bevy of automated safety features. It sounds an alert beep and flashes a yellow warning light if you activate your turn signal when there are other cars or objects in the way. It sounds an even louder alarm if you accelerate when the car in front of you is slowing down. And if you should get a bit too close to that car? The words "COLLISION WARNING" appears on the screen in the center of your dashboard in white letters as the car beeps loudly. The car's center console is an 8-inch touchscreen — large enough to quickly glance at to see, say, where you need to go without taking your eyes off the road for too long. The car almost literally screams safety. It's exactly what Google was looking for.

"When we started on the project, we looked for manufacturers that are really forward-looking," Brenner told BuzzFeed News. "And so we announced the open automotive alliance in January 2014 with Hyundai, Honda, GM, and Audi — all four were very forward-looking. Hyundai ... is doing great things with the cars. They have 8-inch touchscreens, steering wheel control. They're the first ones to come to market with this."

BuzzFeed News

But others carmakers are following quickly. Bentley, Nissan, Jeep, and Infiniti, among others, have agreed to incorporate Android Auto into their vehicles. Some among this group have also signed on to use CarPlay, a rival platform developed by Apple.

"From our research and what we've seen in the market, we see the people are using their phones more and more in their cars," Brenner said. "They don't want to leave the connectedness and benefits of having the cloud and the internet with them right now. But in many states like New York and California it's illegal to even touch your phone. So we really looked at this as something that we can do to help keep people safer. We combine the great stuff of your phone with the things that the car is great at."

In the case of the Hyundai Sonata, that looks something like this: Using an array of buttons on the car's steering wheel, a dashboard touchscreen, and your voice, you can make calls, navigate to a chosen destination, and turn on the radio — or a favorite music app.

While Android Auto might reduce the need — or temptation — to pick up a phone while driving, it does have some limitations. It doesn't recognize voice commands unless they're spoken in a very specific format. So, for example, ending navigation is not as easy as uttering something intuitive like "end navigation" or "stop navigation." Attempting to do exactly that during my test drive, I ended up distractedly paging through a touchscreen help menu until I discovered the proper voice command: "cancel route."

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Taco Bell Is Going Natural, Kind Of

The chain that unleashed the Doritos flavored taco will banish things like artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup from much of its menu.

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Taco Bell has done many amazing things. It added Doritos flavor to its taco shells. It folded a syrupy breakfast taco into a waffle shell, and later a biscuit. It wrapped a burrito inside a quesadilla and dubbed it the Quesarito. Then it used Cap'N Crunch Berries cereal to create a rainbow-colored donut hole. If there was a word to describe such flavor blasted franken-foods, "natural" wouldn't be one of them.

So as other fast food chains made questionable commitments to making their menus healthier and removing unpronounceable ingredients from their food, you might have thought that Taco Bell would hold out, embrace its fast food roots, and admit that it doesn't give a crap about your diet. Because you never ate a Quesarito for your health.

But you'd be wrong.

Taco Bell today announced a new set of standards for ingredients that will remove artificial colors, flavors, added trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, or "unsustainable" palm oil in its food by the end of 2015. "In all cases, they will be replaced with natural alternatives," the company said in a release. That's right, natural.

Taco Bell "is committed to being a brand that people can truly champion and trust," CEO Brian Niccol told BuzzFeed News. While some of the replacement ingredients will cost more, the chain is not increasing menu prices.

But there are some very significant exceptions. Most importantly, the changes won't affect beverages and co-branded items, so while artificial colors may be out of most foods, Doritos Locos Tacos and Cap'N Crunch donut holes will be keeping Taco Bell's menus bright.

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Taco Bell joins other fast food giants that have recently tried to jump about the natural food bandwagon by cleaning up their ingredients. Subway has removed medium chain triglycerides from its chicken and azodicarbonamide from its breads. In May, Panera Bread released a list of "unacceptable" ingredients, what it calls a "No No List," that will be removed from menus by the end of 2016.

Not all of the banned ingredients are bad for health, even if they sound like they are. John Coupland, professor of food science at Penn State, said "I don't think it's likely having an impact on the nutritional quality of the food you're eating." He said while there's an increasing amount of chemophobia today, artificial ingredients aren't categorically worse, or better, for health than natural ingredients.

Liz Matthews, Taco Bell's Chief Food Innovation Officer, steered clear of arguing about the health impact of the new ingredient standards. "There are things that are good and things that are bad, and that's not for us to debate," she said. "We're just here to listen to our customers and they want less in their food and they want simpler ingredients and that's what we're doing."

Niccol and Matthews said Taco Bell has stealthily been making healthy improvements to its menu for 10 years, for example by reducing sodium, but hasn't been marketing it.

For now, Taco Bell doesn't have any plans to remove antibiotics from meat, as chains like McDonald's and Chick-fil-A have recently committed to do, or to go GMO free like Chipotle.

"We want to make sure the replacements aren't sacrificing anything for our customers, because we know they come to us for the experience and bold flavors," said Matthews. That's the priority, naturally.

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Charter Communications Reportedly In Deal To Buy Time Warner Cable

Another bite at the apple for John Malone to create a cable colossus.

Mike Blake / Reuters

Time Warner Cable may be rushing back to the altar in a deal to be bought out by cable billionaire John Malone's Charter Communications, less than a month after a takeover attempt by Comcast failed amid regulatory scrutiny.

Bloomberg News reported earlier Monday that Charter was close to a $55 billion cash-and-stock deal with Time Warner Cable, paying around $195 a share for the company. Combined with the sixth largest cable operator Bright House, which Charter agreed to buy earlier this year for over $10 billion, the combined cable company would solidify itself as number two to Comcast and give it more ability to negotiate with the studios and entertainment companies that provide content for cable operators.

Charter and Time Warner combined would have about 15 million residential cable customers and 17 million residential internet customers. Bright House has 2.5 million paying customers. Time Warner has an especially large presence in New York City and Los Angeles. Comcast has 22.4 million cable and internet customers.

Currently, Charter is the fourth largest cable operator in the country. Comcast's deal with Time Warner put the value of the company's stock at about $159 a share, or $45.2 billion. On Friday, Time Warner Cable's stock closed at a little over $171.

Representatives from Time Warner Cable and Charter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Charter bid just over $61 billion for Time Warner Cable early last year before being rejected in favor of Comcast. A successful acquisition of Time Warner Cable would be another feather in the cap of John Malone, who does not have an official role at Charter beyond being a member of its board of directors and its largest shareholder through his investment vehicle Liberty Broadband, which also owns a stake in Time Warner Cable.

Since Malone sold his cable company TCI to AT&T for over $55 billion in 1999, he has been feverishly making entertainment and cable deals around the world that are often highly complex, spinning together an empire that includes, under some form of his control or influence, SiriusXM, Discovery Communications, the overseas cable company Liberty Global, and the media company Liberty Media.

An acquisition of Time Warner Cable would have to be approved by regulators, who already essentially rejected Comcast's bid, and are still considering AT&T's proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV, which was first announced in May of last year.

New Tool Reveals Searchable Pay Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers

Visa Explorer is built on data submitted to the government during applications for foreign worker visas. It’s one of the most detailed and comprehensive views into wages in corporate America currently available.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

A new searchable database of hundreds of thousands of salaries for foreign workers provides one of the most comprehensive and granular insights into prevailing wages in corporate America.

Released Friday, Visa Explorer lets anyone view the salaries listed as part of applications for H1-B visas — a common form of visa used to bring skilled foreign workers into the U.S. The database breaks down all H1-B visa applications by company, including job titles and salaries, but not the names of individual workers.

The tool draws on public records of Labor Condition Applications (LCAs), the forms which employers file on behalf of prospective employees applying for visas including the H1-B. The database contains 5.2 million individual LCA records dating back to 2001, and lets users sort companies by total requests filed. Topping the list is Indian technology outsourcer Infosys, which has submitted almost 96,000 LCA requests since 2011, according to the database.

Infosys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The salary listed on this paperwork is not always the final salary of the employee, which can later be changed based on other factors. And not all LCA requests result in a worker making it to the U.S., due to annual caps on the number of H1-B and other skilled worker visas.

But the data still gives a rare glimpse into compensation practices across companies and industries, showing the wages paid to a wide swath of skilled workers. While the H1-B visa is best known for its use by tech companies in recruiting foreign engineers, it is also widely used across businesses large and small when hiring all types of foreign professionals.

The unveiling of this tool also means that the salaries of many foreign-born workers are exposed in a way that has no parallel for U.S. citizens and permanent residents (aside, of course, from government employees). The tool is detailed enough that users may be able to identify individual workers with specific job titles within a given company, or those at companies that file relatively few LCAs.

For example, the database shows the New York Times filed an LCA for a chief executive officer in 2015, listing a salary of $1,000,000. The company's British CEO, Mark Thompson, who formerly served as the director general of the BBC, was hired in 2012 on a base salary of $1,000,000, although his total compensation stands to be much higher.

The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The tool's creator, Théo Négri, said on Twitter that he got the idea for the database from #talkpay, a Twitter conversation around wages in Silicon Valley, which took place on May Day.

Though Négri's interest was in tech workers, the tool works across all industries, listing the applications for skilled workers at well-known corporations, universities, think tanks and others. Until now, information on prevailing wages has been spotty at best, either based on anonymous submissions to sites like Glassdoor, or broad averages compiled by government agencies.

Here Are The Best Days To Book A Cheap Flight This Summer

A study analyzing billions of data points collected from online travel agencies shows when is the ideal time to book flights and hotels for busy summer weekends. As a general rule, the ideal time is a long time ago.

Ben Stansall / Getty Images

As the summer travel season officially kicks off this weekend, Adobe's Digital Index research service has published new data on where Americans are traveling, when, and how much they'll spend.

The study, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. travel customers and analyzed billions of data points from online travel agency bookings, found that Americans will spend $65 billion on summer travel this year, up 7% from last year. That translates to an average of $2,788 per traveler.

The Adobe study also looked at which weekends were the most expensive, with Fourth of July ranking highest, followed by Labor Day and Memorial Day. And if you're booking travel for any of these holidays, the best deals can be found about 40 days beforehand for flights, and 90 days out for hotels.

So it's already much too late to get a good deal for Memorial Day—travelers booking now will be a 40% premium on flights and hotels. But here's what the study found about when to book for the big summer holiday weekends.

You needed to book Memorial Day flights back in January to get the best deals.

Adobe

And hotels for Memorial Day were cheapest in March.

Adobe

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Executive Chairman Of Ford Invests In Lyft

Fontinalis Partners, a firm co-founded by William Clay Ford Jr., is participating in Lyft’s Series E funding.

Noam Galai / Getty Images

Lyft is adding yet another investment firm to its roster — and it's a somewhat surprising one. Fontinalis Partners, a venture capital firm co-founded by William Clay Ford Jr. — the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company and great-grandson of Henry Ford — is participating in the company's Series E round. Neither Lyft nor Fontinalis would disclose exactly how much the firm is investing.

The investment brings together two unlikely forces: Ride-hail giant Lyft, which has repeatedly and publicly declared war on the personal transportation market, and Ford, a legacy car manufacturer that has itself begun experimenting with mobility and its own e-hail service, the dynamic shuttle.

As recently as last month, interview Ford CEO Mark Fields questioned Lyft and Uber's ability to replace personal car ownership.

"I think [Uber and Lyft] have been very successful," Fields told BuzzFeed News in April. "But no, I don't think that world is all going to go to car sharing in a compact period of time. I'm very bullish about our traditional business and I'm very bullish about how we're thinking about mobility."

Even so, the Ford company has been experimenting with an app-based shuttle service that utilizes a fleet of Ford vehicles to pick up and drop off passengers along a route determined based on the demand of the users. And it's nearing commercial viability, Fields told BuzzFeed News.

So while the investment seems to conflict with both Ford's core business as well as those that the company is experimenting with, it could point to a collaboration with Lyft.

But when asked about whether there was a connection between this investment and Ford's mobility experiments, Lyft spokeswoman Edie Campbell Urban said: "Fontinalis Partners is not affiliated with Ford Motor Company and this investment is not related to the Ford Dynamic Shuttle experiment."

Other companies in the firm's portfolio include parking solutions companies as well as bike-sharing and car-sharing services. And in addition to the Dynamic Shuttle experiment, Ford company is also experimenting with a parking spotter, a connected, electric bike, and a car-swapping service in Michigan.

"Our investment in Lyft represents a continued commitment to investing in the future of mobility," William Clay Ford Jr. said in a statement. "Lyft is enabling an exciting new model of freedom and personal mobility, as evidenced by its millions of satisfied users. Fontinalis Partners looks forward to working with Lyft to help it in its goal of building a sustainable and interconnected transportation system."

Goldman Sachs Chases The "Gold Rush" To San Francisco

The Wall Street bank held its annual meeting on the West Coast for the first time. “It’s a different kind of gold rush,” CEO Lloyd Blankfein said.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The men on stage wore dark suits and monochrome ties. That alone was enough to tell you they weren't from around here.

Top executives of Goldman Sachs, they came to San Francisco Thursday for the Wall Street bank's annual shareholder meeting, held in this city for the first time. Nothing about the meeting itself was particularly remarkable: It lasted a brisk half hour, in a small auditorium on the ground level of Goldman's office tower. None of the more controversial proposals, including one that would have eliminated a perk for Goldman employees heading to government work, received enough shareholder votes to pass.

But the meeting's location, in the nation's tech capital, sent a clear message about Goldman's ambitions in Silicon Valley. Tech is where the money is. Wall Street wants a bigger piece of the action.

"It's a different kind of gold rush," Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's CEO, who wore a navy pinstripe suit and blue tie, told a small group of reporters after the meeting. "Everyone's from someplace else, but they all want to be here."

"And we're in that group."

Goldman has been successfully courting tech companies for a long time. Over the last decade, it has advised on more technology deals globally than any other investment bank except Credit Suisse, with which it is tied for first, according to PitchBook data.

In 2014, it advised on $36 billion worth of tech IPOs backed by private equity or venture capital, compared with $7 billion in 2013, the PitchBook data shows. In private funding rounds, Goldman recorded $22 billion worth of advisory business in 2014, down from $46 billion the previous year.

Its investment banking clients include Uber, the ride-hailing giant in which Goldman is also an investor. Its alumni, sprinkled throughout the upper echelons of tech companies, include Anthony Noto, the chief financial officer of Twitter. It recently became the first big bank to make a strategic investment in a Bitcoin startup.

Lately, Goldman has been using its annual meetings to showcase far flung places it finds important. In 2013, leaving the New York area for the first time, it held its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, which has become its second-largest office in the United States. Last year the meeting was in Dallas, where it also has a growing office.

But trekking to San Francisco, where Goldman has had a presence stretching back 40 years, had a different resonance. Hardly an out-of-the way outpost, San Francisco, with giant rivers of capital flowing here from mutual funds, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, can seem at times like the new center of our capitalist economy.

"We're here in Silicon Valley a lot, for obvious reasons," Blankfein told reporters. He said he and the other executives spent yesterday evening in dinners with clients. "It's good for the board to see, and it's good for us commercially."

Reporters from Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal had flown here from New York for the meeting. They listened to Blankfein describe Goldman as a "very technologically oriented firm," which recently hired an executive from Discover Financial Services to build an online lending business.

But Goldman, for all the pageantry, still doesn't quite fit in among the hoodie-wearing set. That's by design. Blankfein, asked about market cycles, was characteristically self-deprecating, and far from the stereotypically all-knowing Silicon Valley prophet.

"I'm much better at forecasting the past than the future," he said.

Aeropostale Just Had Its Worst Quarter Ever

Sales fell by 20%, the biggest quarterly decline since going public in 2002. The company’s CEO reiterates his promise for a brand resurrection this fall.

Aeropostale / Via Facebook: Aeropostale

Aeropostale, the preppy teen retailer that for years was a third-best to Abercrombie and American Eagle, just reported a steep 20% decline in sales for the first quarter.

It's the worst sales decline since the company went public in 2002. Aeropostale also reported a net loss of $45.3 million, its tenth straight quarterly loss.

Aeropostale's chief executive officer, Julian Geiger, reiterated his message to investors that the company's turnaround won't truly take hold until this fall's back-to-school shopping season. He noted that the disastrous first quarter "represented a period of transition" for the teen retailer, as it worked through off-message merchandise and coped with the West Coast port slowdown and unseasonably cool weather. Last year, Aeropostale's sales tumbled 12% after falling 12% in 2013. The chain has also been shuttering stores nationwide.

"As I have said previously, the back-to-school period represents the time when all of the disciplines and strategies we have instituted over the last nine months should come to fruition," Geiger said in a statement today. "We are enthusiastic about seeing the results that this key period will bring."

Geiger returned to the company in August after serving as the CEO of cupcake chain Crumbs, which filed for bankruptcy last summer. He has promised big changes to Aeropostale's clothes, pricing and presentation for the fall.

The retailer has been trying everything to win teens back: last year, it rebranded itself as "Aero" and introduced a new logo, buying up Twitter ads to tell teens that "WE ARE A GENERATION OF NOW." It partnered with Vine stars and YouTube personality Bethany Mota for collections after observing that teens now seem to hang out on social media instead of at the mall. Earlier this year, executives stated plans to refine its merchandise to target a female customer known internally as "the flirty tomboy."

But the company continues to be dogged by massive sales declines — this quarter represents its seventh double-digit drop in a row.

In many ways, Aeropostale is at the worst possible intersection of a number of retail trends: the rise of fast-fashion behemoths like H&M and Forever 21, declining foot traffic at malls and a generational shift away from the logos and preppy styles popularized by Abercrombie. Teens have far more options on where to shop today than they did at Aeropostale's peak.

"Frankly, if back-to-school does not work, we believe investors will increasingly question the viability of the chain," Eric Beder, an analyst at Wunderlich, wrote in a May 18 note. "We see no reason to be involved in ARO until there is some definite proof of a turn."

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LINK: Aeropostale Pins Its Hopes On “The Flirty Tomboy”

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Banks Will Pay $5.6 Billion For Foreign Exchange Manipulation, Four Will Plead Guilty

U.S. banks JPMorgan and Citi agree to plead guilty, along with the U.K.–based Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.

FABRICE COFFRINI / Getty Images

Five of the world's largest banks agreed today to pay $5.6 billion in fines and settlements for manipulation of the foreign exchange market, where roughly $5 trillion is traded daily with few rules and oversight compared to other markets. Four of these banks will plead guilty to antitrust violations for conspiring to manipulate currency rates: JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The criminal pleas follow a massive deal last year where four of the banks involved in today's pleas, along with HSBC and Bank of America, paid more than $4 billion in fines and settlements to British and U.S. regulators.

Barclays was not included in the first settlement because it had to work out a deal with the New York financial regulator, the Department of Financial Services. Barclays will pay $2.4 billion combined to the Justice Department, New York's Department of Financial Services, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and the Financial Conduct Authority, the U.K. financial regulator. The bank will also remove several employees.

The pleas come at the end of a 19-month investigation by the Justice Department.

"Starting as early as 2007, currency traders at several banks formed a group they dubbed 'The Cartel.' It is fitting they chose that name as it describes the illegal behavior they were engaged in on a five-year basis," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a news conference.

"Almost every day for five years, they used a private electronic chat room to manipulate the exchange rate between euros and dollars to conceal their collusions, they acted as partners rather than competitors to push the exchange rate in directions favorable to their banks, but detrimental to many others."

The banks will also face three years of probation supervised by a federal court. "These banks acknowledge their role in this conspiracy and are commiteed to changing their corporate cultures starting at the higest levels," Lynch said.

More than $1.8 billion of the combined payments will come in the form of fines paid to the Federal Reserve, while the criminal fines amount to more than $2.5 billion. Bank of America will pay $205 million to the Federal Reserve.

The guilty pleas mark a new step in the evolution of the Justice Department's approach to wrongdoing among large banks. Following the collapse of the audit and consulting firm Arthur Andersen after it was indicted for its role in Enron's accounting fraud and collapse, the company went bankrupt before it could even go to trial.

Since then, prosecutors have tended to extract huge settlements from corporations along with agreements where corporations commit to changing their behavior and not commit further wrongdoing. That started to change last year, when the Swiss bank Credit Suisse and the French bank BNP Paribas paid billions in settlements and fines and pleaded guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy to evade U.S. sanctions, respectively.

Banks and their lawyers had been concerned that guilty pleas could bring along collateral consequences that would go far beyond what prosecutors intended. In the case of Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, however, they were able to win waivers from regulators to continue certain businesses and are still very much ongoing concerns.

UBS, the Swiss bank, will pay $545 million and will plead guilty to wire fraud for playing a role in manipulating LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate used for trillions of dollars of financial transactions. UBS had reached a nonprosecution agreement for LIBOR in late 2012 that its manipulation of foreign exchange had violated. "The Department of Justice will not hesitate to file criminal charges for financial institutions that reoffend," Lynch said.

Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, said that the investigation into currency manipulation will continue.

Another Political News Site, But This One Will Sell You Things

Using money and ideas gained from building a big e-commerce company and selling it to Amazon, Vinit Bharara is getting into political news.

Cafe.com Editor-in-Chief Blake Zeff, Some Spider CEO Vinit Bharara, Some Spider COO and President Paul Smurl, and Scary Mommy Editor-in-Chief Jill Smokler.

Some Spider

Election seasons bring with them fresh waves of media upstarts, and the newest entrant in this cycle's media-contest-within-a-presidential-contest is Cafe.com, a startup whose funding, and, more intriguingly, business model, comes from the world of e-commerce.

Cafe is the third in a group of sites run by a parent company called Some Spider, which is owned by Vinit Bharara, a co-founder of Diapers.com, which sold to Amazon in 2010. Its editor-in-chief will be former Clinton aide and Salon Political Editor Blake Zeff. In an early hiring coup, they poached two top hands from the New York Times' excellent tech team, Paul Smurl and Rajiv Pant, to build their platform.

The site will aim, Zeff said in an interview along with his three colleagues on Tuesday, to speak to Americans about politics through stories deeply rooted in identity. That will mean talking about politics and policy from certain perspectives — Zeff cited ethnicity, gender, occupation, and age as possible angles Cafe will take. And, he said, it will mean putting tech resources into features that allow readers to figure out what, for instance, a tax proposal would mean for them.

But the most distinctive thing about the nascent site isn't its editorial approach. It's the way in which Bharara's e-commerce roots have shaped his approach to media. Cafe is one of three sites he owns, along with the established Scary Mommy, which he purchased, and The Mid, which is focused on people who — well, you're not supposed to use the term "middle-aged."

Bharara described his approach as a "blend between Vox, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and Amazon."

The business model, he said, is rooted in part in watching Scary Mommy raise six figures' worth of money for charities, using the collective power of an intense, engaged community.

"We're trying to create these big blocs of communities," Bharara said. Rather than simply serve readers display ads, the challenge is to "act as their union rep, go to the brands, and figure out a mutually advantageous way" to sell readers products. In the case of Scary Mommy, that could be diapers; on Cafe, Bharara suggested he might connect readers to advocacy groups. The site's revenue would come from vendors, not readers.

Media companies once dreamed of being the home base for engaged, passionate communities, but that has declined alongside the rise of mobile, and of Facebook and Twitter. Bharara said offering "benefits and services" to readers could help build communities in a way that the social networking giants are overlooking.

Facebook and Twitter are, Smurl argued, missing an opportunity to deepen their relationships with users, and to make money selling them things. "They're so focused on growth that they are to some degree sowing the seeds of their own disruption," he said.

Cafe aims to launch this fall with 10 to 15 editorial staffers and plans to grow. The site, Zeff and Bharara said, will not explicitly identify itself as progressive, though both men are Democrats.

"We're not going to [be] studiously nonpartisan like, 'On the one hand, he said she said,'" Zeff said. "But the brand of the thing is not 'Come here, all ye liberals.' We think that if we have really good product we can reach a whole lot of people who frankly don't have a political affiliation."

Bharara and Zeff also addressed a minor complication of running a political website: Bharara's older brother, Preet, is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and has transformed the state's politics with a series of aggressive investigations.

Vinit Bharara said he'd told Zeff to give his brother no quarter.

"You'd have to [write it] if there was a story that was negative about Preet," he said. "It isn't even conceivable that we not go there."

McDonald's Shareholder: If We Paid Better, Shania Twain Would Still Be Working Here

At the company’s annual meeting Thursday, a lively debate broke out regarding proposals for higher pay for restaurant workers.

Jeff Bottari / Getty Images

You might occasionally be thankful to McDonald's for its breakfast sandwiches or French fries, or maybe for the work it gave you as a struggling young actor.

But one McDonald's shareholder, speaking at the company's annual meeting today, said there's another reason we should appreciate the company: Its low wages have ensured a number of successful former employees went on to do better things.

During an open question session where a number of attendees brought up the company's low pay, one man who identified himself as a shareholder for the last 25 years cited a number of celebrities who once worked at McDonald's, including Sharon Stone, Shania Twain, Jay Leno, and Jeff Bezos. "I'm sure if they were making $15 an hour, they'd still be working at McDonald's," he said, calling working at the company "a stepping-stone for people to have a first job."

If wages go up too high, he warned, even the young Sharon Stone's of the future might end up being too pricey. "We're going to have robots, and less employees," he said, saying those seeking higher wages are "shooting themselves in the foot."

Hundreds of McDonald's employees and minimum-wage activists have gathered at the company's headquarters to protest the shareholder meeting. About a hundred were arrested on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

Responding to questions from protesters around wages, McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook said the company "voluntarily agreed to pay a dollar above the legal minimum" in the stores it directly controls and left the rest to franchisees. "Our independent owners can make their own decisions," he said.

He also touted the company's increase in paid personal time off and education subsidies. "The flexibility that offers them in the workplace is much appreciated by our staff," he said, calling employees "incredibly grateful."

LINK: McDonald’s Boosts Wages In Company-Owned Restaurants

Many Women Are Hidden From Unemployment Numbers, Study Says

People held back from full-time work due to child care or family obligations are considered “voluntarily” unemployed. That removes many workers — especially women — from closely watched economic data.

Issei Kato / Reuters

Randa Jama, a wheelchair attendant at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, would be referred to as a "voluntary" part-time worker in the jobs data produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). She only works weekends, spending weekdays caring for her children, in large part because she couldn't afford a babysitter without much better hours and pay.

Though Jama says she would prefer to be working full-time, that information doesn't filter through to the nation's monthly employment report. The same goes for many other workers — almost a million, mainly women, one advocacy group estimates — who can't work the full-time hours they want to, and aren't classed alongside other unemployed or underemployed people in official data.

The distinction comes from a question, asked as part of the BLS population survey, about underemployment caused by "economic" or "non-economic reasons." It classes factors like child care as non-economic reasons people aren't working more hours - and commonly refers to these workers as "voluntarily" part time.

"The number of people working part time for economic reasons is a closely watched economic indicator," reads the interviewer's manual for the survey, as "a measure of underemployment and of the inability of the nation's economy to generate the types of jobs desired."

Those working part-time for "non-economic reasons" (sometimes referred to as "voluntarily" part-time) are not watched the same way.

"They reflect personal, rather than business, reasons for working part time," the manual says. It means measurements of the economy's ability to create full-time work could be overlooking many part-time working women who are not working full-time because of a lack of child care, or other family obligations.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that while the terminology "economic" and "non-economic" is correct, describing workers in need of child care as "voluntarily" part time is misleading.

"What we're trying to measure is the strength of the economy," Baker told BuzzFeed News. "For that, they're asking the right question: 'If the economy were stronger, would these people have jobs?' But if the economy were stronger and these women still didn't have child care, they still wouldn't be working full-time."

Baker said the unemployment numbers also don't account for women who would like to be working full- or part-time, but aren't actively looking for work because they can't afford child care. Similarly, workers who are part-time because of transportation issues — such as an inability to get to and from jobs in the suburbs — would be counted as "voluntarily" part time for "non-economic reasons," despite wanting full employment.

A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a liberal advocacy group, estimated about a million women want to work full-time but can't due to these "voluntary" reasons.

"In theory the economy could be robust enough where these women could have their needs met," said Aditi Sen, a CPD researcher who co-authored the study. Policymakers may put less focus on full employment for women, she argued, if the official statistics don't include their desire for full time work.

Via Center for Popular Democracy

Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor at the University of Michigan, said that the BLS isn't hiding any data.

"There's no doubt that above and beyond the people we count as unemployed there is slack at a number of margins," he said, giving the example of jobless workers who are not actively seeking work but who would take jobs if they were offered them. This group is also not included in the top-line numbers of the jobs report.

Wolfers said the BLS publishes extensive data and statistics on those margins, adding that the CPD report may not be a "reflection on the current moment, but something that's been going on."

Karen Kosanovich, an economist with the Current Population Survey program at the BLS, said the survey asks those who are working part-time for non-economic reasons if they would prefer to be working full time, but their answers are not released with the jobs report data.

"The reason for part time work and the desire for full time work are separate," said Kosanovich. "They're asked in separate questions, and we don't have any tables that include that [latter] information."

The last time the BLS population survey questions were revised was back in 1994. New questions helped capture a population of workers that previously went unrecorded.

"The biggest thing the new questions caught were women and men working at the part-time margin, especially women doing work outside the home," said Brad Hershbein, a visiting fellow at The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute.

Both Hershbein and Baker said adding new questions in the BLS survey could help capture the growing share of contemporary workers with irregular schedules — such as those moonlighting as an Uber driver for 15 hours a week. They could show more people in the workforce working part-time — with ramifications for overall data on unemployment — just like the questions added in the '90s did.

"They made these changes [to the survey] to keep up to date with who's working and what work looks like now, but they haven't updated it in 20 years," Hershbein said. "And it turns out the way they asked the questions increased the labor force participation."

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The Camp, Google's Sicilian Davos, Returns For A Second Year

The secretive conference known as The Camp, which debuted last year, is being held again at a luxurious golf resort in Sicily.

Tullio M. Puglia / Getty Images

The most exclusive conference in tech is back for a second year.

Google is returning to Sicily this summer to host The Camp, a gathering of power players from technology and finance, which had its debut last year, BuzzFeed News has learned.

While Google hosts some conferences through its Ideas arm, this one stands apart. With its elite guest list and luxurious setting, the Camp is more akin to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the rarefied gathering of business and government titans held each winter in a snowy ski resort town.

It's also shrouded in secrecy. The only publicly available indication of its existence is the landing page of a password-protected website. Google's press team did not respond to a request for comment.

Via thecamp2015.com

Still, BuzzFeed News was able to gather some information from a source who received an invitation. As it was last year, the Camp is being held at the Verdura Resort, an opulent enclave of golf courses and Mediterranean indulgences on Sicily's southwestern coast. It runs from July 26th to 30th.

Omid Kordestani, Google's chief business officer, is overseeing the event, our source said.

A Sicilian blogger, Tony Siino, tipped us off to this year's Camp.

In addition to high-powered networking and high-minded discussion, guests will be able to avail themselves of the resort's offerings. These include three golf courses, four restaurants, five bars, six clay tennis courts, and a 4,000 square-meter spa, according to the resort's website.

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How Public Universities Shortchange Poor And Minority Students

Two new studies consider how public universities fall short in serving many of the people most in need of their help.

Jemal Countess / Getty Images

In the pursuit of prestige, revenue, and rankings, more public universities have turned to dangling merit-based scholarships to attract more out-of-state students, according to a report by the New America Foundation released earlier this week. The result: shortchanging both poor students, who are less likely to receive such aid, and students in the states the universities are funded to serve.

Public colleges once devoted the biggest chunk of their financial aid money, some 34%, to students in the bottom income quartile, giving just 16% to the wealthiest students, the report says. That has now shifted dramatically: Financial aid at public colleges now goes equally to the top and bottom quartile of students, with wealthy students receiving 23% of financial aid. The poorest students now receive only 25%.

The push toward funneling aid to privileged out-of-state students reflects a change in the nature of public higher education. "By bringing in more and more wealthy nonresident students, these colleges are increasingly becoming bastions of privilege," the report says.

Schools that provide merit aid, it found, tend to enroll far more students from out of state, who typically pick up more merit-based scholarships than in-state students. They also tend to enroll fewer poor students — and charge those poor students more money.

A separate report this week by the left-leaning think tank Demos suggests that black students may also be disproportionately impacted by such policies.

At public colleges, more than any other schools, the rising tide of student debt has disproportionately burdened students of color, the report said. The gap between black and white student borrowing at four-year public schools is more pronounced than at private and for-profit schools. An estimated 81% of black students at public colleges borrow for their bachelor's degrees, compared to 63% of white students, a gap of 18 percentage points. At private universities, that gap is 12 percentage points.

"The decrease in need-based aid almost certainly has a big part to play" in that gap, said Mark Huelsman, the Demos study's author.

Last year, a study by professors at the Universities of Arizona, Michigan, and Missouri found schools that boosted enrollment of out-of-state students saw their percentage of minority students stagnate or decline.

Public colleges have a lot to gain from offering merit aid to boost the number of out-of-state students they enroll. Out-of-state students pay higher tuition, increasing revenues; they also tend to have higher test scores and grades, which can boost colleges' rankings and prestige.

"Providing four $5,000 scholarships to otherwise 'full-pay' students is much more lucrative for schools than spending $20,000 on one low-income student," the New America report says.

The push for out-of-state students and merit aid spans all different public colleges, the report found, from large research universities that want to compete with prestigious private schools to smaller regional colleges that feel the need to bring in out-of-state students to stay afloat financially.

Many of the country's biggest public universities are among those funneling merit aid to students without need, according to the New America report. Arizona State University, Auburn University, Ohio State University, and dozens of others all give aid money to more than a quarter of students who have no financial need.

At the University of South Carolina, almost 40% of students with no need receive an average of $5,200 in aid. The percentage of USC students who come from out of state has grown to 45%, a 23-point increase from 2000.

Pepsi Finally Realizes Latinos Love Flavors, Launches Pepsi Limón

Putting real lime juice and real sugar in the new drink is an attempt to “capture the taste profile that Hispanics love,” a spokesperson says.

Among the soft truths in marketing is that Latinos love flavor (but not peanut butter and pretzels). So Pepsi is bringing back lime flavored Pepsi, and this time it's marketing the product to Hispanic consumers. It's called Pepsi Limón and it "captures the tart, refreshing taste that Hispanics love to enjoy," according to a press release. Speicifiacally, Pepsi means lime and sugar.

PepsiCo / Via PRNewsFoto

Brands are eager to reach Hispanic consumers, who represent almost one-sixth of the U.S. population. This idea came from Pepsi's internal Hispanic employee group, Adelante, which encouraged the company to create the product based on their flavor preferences. So Pepsi made Limón with 2% lime juice and sugar rather than artificial lime and high fructose corn syrup.

Pepsi last attempted a lime variety in 2005 after Coca-Cola launched a lime Coke but quickly discontinued the artificially-flavored lime cola. "We knew that we couldn't just recreate the product like we did in the past, but that we needed real sugar and real lime juice to capture the taste profile that Hispanics love," said spokeswoman Elisa Baker in an email.

Can real lime juice and Latinos give lime-flavored Pepsi another shot?

Marketers have tried to appeal to Latino's apparent passion for flavors before. Coors' citrus flavored Coors Light Summer Brew, for instance, "was designed specifically for the Latino drinker to bring new users into the franchise," the company's senior director of multicultural marketing told CNN Money in 2014. Summer Brew is coming back this year, but as "Coors Light Citrus Radler," which doesn't seem Hispanic at all.

coorslight.com

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New York Financial Regulator Ben Lawsky To Step Down

His next move: Stanford University, and starting up his own consultancy focused on cybersecurity.

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Ben Lawsky, the first head of New York state's combined financial regulator, will leave his job in late June, his office said in a statement.

Since taking the top job at the newly-created Department of Financial Services in May, 2011, Lawsky quickly turned into a high-profile regulator, especially for foreign banks operating in the United States.

A former prosecutor and staffer for Governor Andrew Cuomo, Lawsky sometimes clashed with fellow regulators and would enact harsher sanctions than his federal and law enforcement colleagues. One such incident came when he threatened to essentially banish Standard Chartered, the British bank, from operating in the United States, over allegations that it had laundered money for Iranian companies and individuals in violation of U.S. sanctions.

Lawsky ultimately extracted a $340 million penalty from Standard Chartered, and put his office on the map after less than a year in business.

"I am deeply proud of the work our team has done building this new agency and helping strengthen oversight of the financial markets. We have assembled a great team at NYDFS and I have full confidence that the critical work of this agency will continue seamlessly moving forward," Lawsky said in a statement.

After leaving DFS, Lawsky will head west to be a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Cyber Initiative and will start and law and consulting firm that will focus on cybersecurity and payments issues, a source familiar with Lawsky's plans told BuzzFeed News. The firm will be based in New York and Lawsky will not appear before DFS in his role at the new company, the source said.

Lawsky's office has taken an interest in payments and cybersecurity issues recently, including working on a regulatory framework for Bitcoin companies along with heightened standards and examinations for cybersecurity at insurance companies.

Over his time in office, Lawsky won several large sanctions and money laundering settlements and eventually started to insist that banks dismiss some employees as a condition of settling with the department.

"If you don't hold them accountable, it's Groundhog Day, you're going to get a big settlement and they're going to do it again in a couple years," Lawsky told BuzzFeed News in an interview last year.

Just today, Barclays paid a $485 million penalty to the DFS as part of its deal with regulators and law enforcement agencies over currency manipulation. A spokesman for DFS declined to comment beyond the statement putout by DFS.

LINK: New York’s Wall Street Regulator Looks To Shift To More Punishments Of Individuals

LINK: New York’s Financial Regulator Worries About An “Armageddon-Type” Cyberattack

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