By Kelly Faircloth 4/08 2:30pm

Nom

In the real world, this costs money. (Photo: Flickr.com/blueace)

Could All That Free Food Get Tech Companies in Trouble with the Tax Man?

Free food is such a staple of Startupland that when Marissa Mayer introduced free food to Yahoo, she was heralded like Moses stepping down from Mt. Sinai, stone tablets in hand. But the Wall Street Journal reports that all that gratis grub could land tech companies in trouble with the IRS.

That’s because, to the enforcers in Washington, these perks look an awful lot like another form of compensation, and the IRS often considers regular meals a taxable benefit.

The Journal reports: Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 3/26 8:56am

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$30 million buys a lot of shirts with whimsical patterns. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Booting Up: This Teen Just Made Millions Off Yahoo

As if recently released prisoners didn’t have enough trouble readjusting to life on the outside, now they have to learn all sorts of new digital skills, too. [WNYC]

Spotify is reportedly launching its own video streaming service, with plans for original content. [Business Insider]

Yahoo just bought the news app Summly for a reported $30 million, making its 17-year-old creator a very, very wealthy young man. Try not to spend it all in one place, kid! [AllThingsD]

China’s getting its very own Snapchat clone. [Tech in Asia]

Speaking of China: Tencent’s QQ (the largest IM service in China, with 780 million MAU) has just released a version designed for Facebook. It comes with built-in chat translation features. [QQ]

 

By Kelly Faircloth 3/20 8:10am

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(Photo: Wikipedia)

Booting Up: Does Yahoo Want Its Very Own Video Site?

Twitter now has a broadly worded patent on its own service, but the company pinkie swears it won’t go patent trolling. [The Verge]

Yahoo’s reportedly in negotiations to buy a big stake in the video site Dailymotion. Does someone have a little GOOG envy, hmm? [Wall Street Journal]

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, who was thought to be in the running for Adobe CEO, was named Apple’s VP of technology. Given the animosity between the two companies, we’re going to guess he won’t be invited back for employee happy hours. [AllThingsD]

But is he any good? Or is he a “bozo”? [Daring Fireball]

Google is expanding Fiber to the suburb of Olathe, Kansas. And here we thought cities owned the 21st Century. [Kansas City Star]

“Android has outgrown Andy and honestly, I don’t think he knows where to take it next.” [The Verge]

By Kelly Faircloth 3/07 8:02am

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Gotcha! (Photo: In the Capital)

Booting Up: Get PSYCHED For a Facebook News Feed Revamp

Today Facebook will probably be unveiling a revamp of its News Feed, complete with content-specific streams like a photo feed. Also: bigger, better ads. [TechCrunch]

“Nightmare bacteria” are officially a thing, resistant to antibiotics and haunting your worst hospital-related dreams. So if anybody’s got any really clever public-health ideas, now’s the time. [Washington Post]

“Once I emerged from a coding bender with a fine, downy moss on my legs and trunk, a colony of moths in my hair. Are you honestly ready to bring such a symphony of efficiency to a halt?” [Tim Sniffen]

The EU has no intention of letting U.S.-based tech companies ignore its stringent data-protection laws. [Bloomberg]

But the EU might also be walking back some of its strictest rules. [ZD Net]

Apparently Carl Icahn is being a party-pooper about Dell’s attempt to go private. [Reuters]

By Kelly Faircloth 3/06 9:59am

Work From Home

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Report: Marissa Mayer Was Just Trying to Make Working at Yahoo Less of a Complete Bummer

Judging from the reaction to Yahoo’s abolishment of work-from-home arrangements, you’d think CEO Marissa Mayer had bitten the head off a live dove onstage at CES or something. After plying her new employees with free food and iPhones, had a tyrant finally revealed herself?

Not so much, according to the New York Times, which says the move was actually part and parcel of Ms. Mayer’s ongoing campaign to make working at the company less of a complete bummer, all right? If that’s okay with you, Richard Branson?

The Times paints a pretty dismal picture of conditions at the company:  Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 3/04 10:17am

Work From Home

Let's all work from SPACE! (Photo: Chatter-fest)

Richard Branson Just Won’t Shut Up About Telecommuting

Just when we all thought the furor about whether Yahoos! can work from home might finally die down, Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the matter–siding with Ms. Mayer. During his weekly radio show, reports Capital New York, he noted that, “I’ve always said, telecommuting is one of the dumber ideas I’ve ever heard.”

Well, Sir Richard Branson, for one, could not believe his ears. Absolutely aghast at this latest turn of events, the gallivanting founder of Virgin Group employed his blog once again to preach the gospel of working remotely and/or butt into the business of other major moguls:  Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 2/27 8:37am

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(Photo: flickr.com/jaxed)

Booting Up: Apple Thinks You Should Be Able to Marry Whoever You Want

Several big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Intel have publicly declared their support for gay marriage. They’re part of a corporate group that’s reportedly planning to file an amicus brief in support of overturning California’s Prop 8. [Bloomberg]

Yahoo would like you to know that its new, anti-work-from-home police has absolutely nothing to do with you (unless you work at Yahoo). [Mercury News]

“While hanging with my 12 year old cousin the other day, I unknowingly entered into the world of Tweenstagram, a vastly different space than the Instagram I have grown to know and love (and refresh too often).” Do go on. [Wisdom of Pearls]

Max Levchin, one of the cofounders of PayPal, is launching a new mobile payments startup with the chipper name of Affirm. “You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back.” [AllThingsD]

Former Square COO Keith Rabois, who left in the wake of sexual harassment accusations, has landed at Khlosa Ventures as a VC. [AllThingsD]

By Patrick Clark 2/20 8:01am

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She's laughing at you, fandom. LAUGHING AT YOU.

Booting Up: Marissa Mayer Would Like You to Meet the New Yahoo

Marissa Mayer introduced Yahoo users to a “new, more modern experience” for finding “the best of the web” in a blog post early this morning. [Yahoo]

Ever dream of founding the next Apple, Facebook or Twitter? That might be a long shot. But if you act fast, you can probably get your computer hacked by visiting the same website that compromised the recently-hacked tech giants. [AllThingsD]

“We used to have these ads, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, and the Mac was always the cool guy,” Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak told Bloomberg. “And ouch, it’s painful, because we kind of are losing that.”[Bloomberg]

Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive dropped some knowledge on a British children’s television show. [Quartz]

“You cannot be cross-shopped on Amazon is like e-com 2.0,” said Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. [PandoDaily]

By Patrick Clark 1/29 7:49am

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ap_chad

Booting Up: Etsy is Big In Alaska (and Everywhere Else)

Etsy community sales topped $895 million last year, according to CEO Chad Dickerson. Who bought? The knit scarf-wearing citizens of Alaska and Massachusetts more than pulled their weight. [Etsy]

Meanwhile, pour out a little bit of Earl Grey for Regretsy, as the craft-snark blog is shuttering. Wrote founder April Winchell in a blog post: “After three and a half years, I’ve said everything I have to say about it, and now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse.” [The Daily Dot]

The nice thing about a Yahoo earnings call, if you’re Kara Swisher, is that you don’t have to hide in the vents to hear what Marissa Mayer is saying. The good news: Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates. The bad: Revenue was flat, and oh, can someone do something about that pre-call elevator music? [AllThingsD]

That was a short-lived experiment: Months after Tumblr gave users the option of paying $5 to pin content to the top of followers’ dashboards, the pay-to-pin feature has been abandoned. [The Daily Dot]

This hardware will self-destruct: the Pentagon is interested in military hardware “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner”—the better to keep enemies from collecting and reverse-engineering the detritus of war. [Wired]

Less than a week after Twitter launched Vine, the video-sharing app it acquired last year, the company went back to the acquisition well, announcing a deal for Crashlytics, which tracks bad code when apps fail. [Business Insider]