The Texas Tribune picked up two more leadership staff Monday, including a former Texas Monthly publisher.
April Hinkle spent 21 years as publisher of Austin-based Texas Monthly magazine, working her way up through various director, manager and executive roles. She will now act as business development director for the nonprofit news website, working to secure more corporate sponsorships.
At the same time, former Deloitte Consulting senior consultant Shadi Afshar was hired to lead audience development. The recent McCombs School of Business graduate is charged with increasing Web traffic, recruiting new members and publicizing editorial projects and events.
In January, the Tribune picked board member and former AOL and Examiner.com executive Michael Sherrod as its first publisher. Two months previous, it removed its general manager position close after hiring Austin Technology Council President Alisha Ring.
A tepid gain in consumer spending last month could fuel a debate over whether the U.S. and other governments should further stimulate their economies to sustain the recovery.
A report that Americans spent cautiously in May came after world leaders meeting in Toronto over the weekend pledged to reduce government deficits by cutting spending and raising taxes. They did so despite warnings from President Barack Obama that scaling back spending too fast could derail the global recovery.
U.S. lawmakers are wary of approving more stimulus spending in light of record deficits. As a result, millions of Americans could lose unemployment benefits and states could be forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers.
"In our view, it is way too early to apply the fiscal brakes," said Zach Pandl, an economist at Nomura Securities. Cutting off unemployment benefits "is a dangerous way to cut deficits when the economy is still fragile."
Economic growth, which leads to higher tax receipts and less spending on social programs, is the best way to reduce the deficit, Pandl said.
Other economists note that wages and salaries rose 0.5 percent in May, a second consecutive month of strong gains. That is a sign that the recovery can survive without government propping it up lowest fee payday loans.
If the trend in income growth continues, "consumers’ spending power will be bolstered, which will in turn drive economic growth, necessitating less government support," said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak.
One thing is certain: Americans are being careful with their money. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent last month after no change in April, the Commerce Department said Monday.
Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of economic activity. But the consumer hasn’t been driving this recovery. Instead, it has depended more on business and government spending, along with exports. In the four quarters following the steep 1981-82 downturn, consumer spending rose by an average of 6.5 percent per quarter. By contrast, even as the economy has grown for the last three quarters, consumer spending rose an average of only 2.5 percent per quarter.
If consumption remains sluggish, the economy may not grow fast enough to generate jobs and quickly bring down the 9.7 percent unemployment rate.
The FBI is investigating a security breach of AT&T’s website that allowed hackers to access the e-mail addresses of iPad owners.
"The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions," an FBI spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. "We have opened an investigation to address the potential cyber threat." The Bureau did not comment on the scope of its investigation.
A hacker group called Goatse Security exploited a vulnerability on AT&T’s website to harvest the e-mail addresses that iPad 3G buyers provided to activate their devices. The group sent the information to tech and gossip blog Gawker, which reported that 114,000 e-mail addresses were exposed.
Without commenting on the vast scope of the alleged hack, AT&T (T, Fortune 500) acknowledged taking action to fix a security hole online payday advance.
The exposure connected subscribers’ e-mail addresses with their iPad ICC IDs, a unique identification number used to link devices with their owners. AT&T linked them so that users of Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) 3G version of the iPad would not have to type in their e-mail addresses every time they wanted to access or change their AT&T account and billing settings.
AT&T said e-mail addresses were the only information that could have been exposed as a result of the glitch, and that it will inform all customers who may have been affected. The company would not comment on the FBI investigation.
Attorney General Bill McCollum announced a settlement with Certegy Check Services Inc. over allegations the company did not provide adequate data security for consumer records.
Under the settlement, Certegy will ensure that safeguards are in place to protect consumer data, a release said. The company will maintain a comprehensive “Information Security Program” that assess internal and external risks to consumers’ personal information, implements safeguards to protect that information, and regularly monitors and tests the effectiveness of those safeguards.
Certegy also will contribute $125,000 to the Attorney General’s Seniors vs. Crime Program and will pay $850,000 for the state’s investigative costs and attorney’s fees, the release said.
Certegy reported in July 2007 that a former company employee had stolen customer data. Certegy notified authorities and consumers, the release said. The former employee, William Sullivan, subsequently was convicted of fraud and is serving a 57-month sentence in federal prison.
Certegy, based in St. Petersburg, is a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (NYSE: FIS), headquartered in Jacksonville.
Tax day is Thursday and if you’ve waited until the last minute to file your return, that makes you a prime target for tax preparers.
The days leading up to April 15 are like Black Friday for companies like H&R Block and TurboTax. And they’re all looking for an edge that will get you "in the door."
As more and more taxpayers spend time e-filing and scouring the Internet for tax help, finding ways to optimize online ads is invaluable for tax preparers. And that’s where Google comes in. The search giant’s analytics tools can narrow down when most people are searching for tax help, making it prime time for advertising those services.
Unsurprisingly, Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) says the volume of searches for terms like "tax," "taxes," and "IRS" doubles between February and mid-April. But by using advanced tools like Google Insights, tax preparers can find a much more revealing trend: The majority of people really only care about taxes for about six or seven days a year.
Search traffic for "taxes" surges an average 150% right after W2s are distributed during the first week of February. Those searches quickly die down and stay low until the days leading up to April 15. During the last three- to four-day stretch of tax season, tax-related searches rise an average of 270%. That’s nearly quadruple the amount that occurs during a typical week in the "off-season."
TurboTax, which is a Google Analytics customer, calls the trend "Batman ears": Two exceedingly short periods of time to get it right or pay the price.
"Google is really important to our business because it helps us understand consumers’ behavioral intent so we can serve up the right types of ads in the right places to the right people," said Seth Greenberg, director of national media and digital marketing at TurboTax. "There’s such a small window of time, and the margin of error is so tight."
TurboTax, which is owned by Intuit (INTU), took in just under $1 billion of revenue from its tax products last year, and $780 million of that came during tax season.
"The two peaks make or break tax companies’ years," said Jon Kaplan, head of Google’s financial services industry team faxless pay day loans. "They have to have a sound, focused marketing strategy that takes advantage of those three- to four-day peaks, and they can’t really have a bad day."
Cutting through the noise
As more people file online, competition is growing more intense: A search query for "taxes" on Tuesday returned sponsored ads from 11 of Google’s advertising partners, including TurboTax, H&R Block (HRB), and Jackson Hewitt, all promoting their free online e-file systems. Google said its partners spend tens of millions of search advertising dollars during tax season.
To cut through the noise, TurboTax said Google helps it offer its most relevant taxpayer ads at the most relevant time.
Some of the solutions have little to do with analytics. For instance, Google allows TurboTax to display two different types of ads: one for existing TurboTax customers and one for potential new customers. It also lets TurboTax do "remarketing." That is, showing ads specifically for customers who visited the site but ultimately didn’t use TurboTax’s products.
Other solutions are a little more involved. For example, Google’s data show that searches for "tax refund" soar in early February, when W2s go out, and then taper off. TurboTax says it found a correlation between early filers and those getting refunds, allowing the company to adjust its ads accordingly.
Google also found that most people clicking on TurboTax ads were from a younger demographic, which the company chalks up to the fact that it runs its tax business exclusively on the computer. As a result, TurboTax has turned to social networking to attract customers. It also had a "Tax Rap" competition this year, the winner of which is currently displayed on YouTube’s homepage.
In addition to the usual "taxes," "how to file," and "tax refund" searches, this year is bringing hot searches for "unemployment and taxes," as well as ones related to first-time homebuyer tax credit, new car purchase credit and Energy Star tax credits.
And the top tax-related search this week? "Tax extension."
Buyers lusting after one of the most lucrative domain names in the world, sex.com, will have to wait for their chance to bid on the coveted Internet property.
The rights to sex.com were scheduled to be auctioned off Thursday, with bidders required to put up $1 million just to get in the door, after the previous owner, Escom, went into foreclosure for unpaid debts.
But the auction was postponed after Escom was forced into bankruptcy court late Wednesday by a group of creditors, according to Scott Matthews, a lawyer for DOM Partners, one of Escom’s main creditors.
"The auction has been postponed based upon an involuntary bankruptcy filing in California that was filed after 5 p.m. yesterday," Matthews said, adding that a sale will eventually happen, though he could not say when.
Matthews said there had been "significant interest" in the domain name, but he declined to say how many bidders were scheduled to take part in the auction.
Escom reportedly paid $14 million for sex.com when it bought the site in 2006. DOM Partners helped finance the deal and acquired the rights when Escom failed to make payments earlier this year.
DOM announced plans last week to sell the site to the highest bidder in the equivalent of a foreclosure sale. But the auction was scratched after three of Escom’s creditors filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against Escom in the U payday loan lenders.S. Bankruptcy Court in California’s Central District.
The creditors — Washington Technology Associates, iEntertainment Inc. and AccountingMatters.com — claim Escom owes them more than $10 million.
The dispute marks the latest twist in the storied history of sex.com, which is potentially one of the most profitable internet properties.
Gary Kremen, founder of Match.com, first registered sex.com in 1994. He spent several years in court battling with Stephen Cohen, an adult entertainment mogul with a checkered past, over the site’s ownership.
In 1995, Kremen accused Cohen of stealing sex.com from him in a scheme that involved forged letters and falsified e-mails. In 2000, a court handed control of the domain name back to Kremen and ordered Cohen to pay $65 million to Kremen. Cohen subsequently appealed and the case was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2003.
Two years later, Cohen was arrested in Tijuana for failing to appear in court. He was released in 2007, according to published reports.
U.S. stocks looked ready for a strong start Monday, as investors continue to be upbeat about the economic recovery following a key report on retail sales and ahead of comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Dow Jones industrial average futures were higher.
Futures measure current index values against their perceived future performance and offer an indication of how markets may open when trading begins.
Wall Street has rallied for the past two weeks as investors have gained confidence in the pace of the economic recovery.
"There really just doesn’t seem to be anything holding this market back," said Manus Cranny, senior market commentator of MF Global Spreads in London.
Cranny said the markets are being driven by "a tsunami of positive sentiment."
Economy: Retail sales jumped 1.4% in October from the prior month, according to the Census Bureau, exceeding the increase of 0.9% expected by a consensus of economists surveyed by Briefing.com. Sales without automobiles rose 0.2%, falling short of the 0.4% gain that was forecast by Briefing.com consensus.
That’s compared to an overall decline of 1.5%, or an increase of 0.5% without auto sales, the prior month.
A survey on manufacturing in New York state also comes out at 8:30 a payday loan companies.m. ET. That’s followed by a report on September business inventories at 10 a.m. ET.
The Fed: Bernanke will offer an outlook of the U.S. economy at a speech in New York City, starting at 12:15 p.m. ET.
Autos: General Motors, releasing its first financial results since emerging from bankruptcy in July, said it lost $1.2 billion in the third quarter. It also said it would begin repaying government loans in December. The U.S. government will received $1 billion, with nearly $200 million going to the Canadian and Ontario governments.
World markets: Stocks worldwide were lifted amid optimism that governments would keep up stimulus efforts. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei added 0.2%. European shares jumped in midday trading.
Money, oil and gold: The anemic dollar was lower versus major international currencies.
Commodities continued to benefit from the weaker greenback. Oil for December delivery jumped 68 cents to $77.03 a barrel.
And gold prices, which have been on a tear this month, reached a new record of $1,133.50 a troy ounce before retreating slightly. The precious metal was still up $11.90 per troy ounce to $1,128.60 in electronic trading.
Oil fell more than 2% Wednesday on worries about demand in the world’s largest fuel consumer after data showed a surprise build in U.S. gasoline inventories and weak U.S. new home sales.
U.S. crude oil inventories rose less than expected last week as imports increased, but gasoline stockpiles logged an unexpected gain of 1.7 million barrels, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
"Crude stocks were only up 800,000 but the surprise was gasoline stocks. I think that’s what is keeping the market down," said Dan Flynn, analyst at PFGBEST Research in Chicago.
U.S. crude fell $2.09, or 2.63%, and settled at $77.46 a barrel.
Oil prices came under pressure after data showed sales of new U companies making payday loans.S. homes tumbled unexpectedly in September, the first drop in six months, feeding doubt about an economic recovery.
Oil markets have been watching equities and economic data for signs of a rebound that could lift flagging fuel demand.
U.S. and European equity markets fell after the housing sales data. The U.S. dollar rose on safe-haven demand.
Weaker crude oil prices and slumping margins at refineries knocked quarterly earnings lower at ConocoPhillips (COP, Fortune 500), PetroChina (PCCYF) and Hess Corp., (HES, Fortune 500) all of which reported earnings on Wednesday.
If the word ‘cybercrime’ conjures up images of computer geeks trying to crash computers from their mothers’ basements, think again.
Cybercrime has become a rapidly growing underground business built by savvy criminals, who buy and sell valuable stolen financial information from millions of unsuspecting Internet users every year in an on online black market.
"Most cybercriminals are very, very interested in financial gain by compromising customer accounts," said FBI special agent Austin Berglas, who supervises the Bureau’s New York Internet crimes squad. "Believe it or not, there are people who fall victim to their scams, and we see it every day."
Because cybercriminals are so skilled at hacking into thousands of computers every day, the crime is potentially a billion-dollar business. If every stolen credit card and bank account had been wiped clean last year, that would have netted cybercriminals some $8 billion, according to data from Symantec, maker of the Norton antivirus software.
As a result of the lucrative payout, more and more online criminals are entering the game. In fact, the number of new Internet security threats rose nearly three-fold last year to 1.7 million.
Those cyber attacks mostly come from malware, or malicious software, that hands control of your computer, and anything on it or entered into it, over to the bad guys without you even knowing it. The most common forms of malware include keystroke logging, spyware, viruses, worms and Trojan horses.
How the deed is done. Once your information has been stolen, cybercriminals go onto an invitation-only Internet Relay Chat (like a chat group) to do commerce with other online criminals. Cybercriminals will often set up a hacker channel for a matter of days, do business, and then take it down to avoid detection. When active, hacker IRCs can get upwards of 90,000 cybercriminals talking to one another at a given time, according to Dave Cole, senior director of product management at Symantec.
Online criminals use the IRCs to sell or trade your credit card or bank account information. Credit cards are some of the cheapest commodities sold on the Internet Black Market, averaging about 98 cents each when sold in bulk. A full identity goes for just $10.
Credit cards and bank account information made up 51% of the goods advertised on the underground economy last year, up from 38% in 2007. Credit cards are most popular because they’re the cheapest stolen commodity. Cards with expiration dates, CVV2 numbers and names go for more than ones with numbers only, but there is no honor in the underground online crime world — oftentimes hackers will sell the same credit card information to multiple users, and many have already been canceled.
As a result, buyers and sellers on IRC channels will often give the information to a trusted third party for a fee guaranteed high risk personal loans. The third party will test the card information, often by charging a very nominal amount or by posing as a charity, and then verify the goods to the buyer.
After the information is purchased by a secondary criminal, that person can use a machine to print out a fake credit card with your information. But many use yet another tertiary person to wire stolen money into an overseas bank account.
That third person in the chain is usually called a "mule," who often doesn’t even know he or she is part of an underground organized crime scheme. Many mules respond to the "make money from home" schemes, where stolen money is sent to their accounts, and they subsequently wire that money to an overseas account for a 10% to 15% fee.
Other mules are given phony ATM cards and are asked to retrieve cash for a small fee. But there is substantial risk involved — law enforcement usually comes knocking on mules’ doors first.
To catch a thief. The FBI is working undercover in many of these IRC channels in an effort to thwart the cybercriminals. And in many cases, captured criminals agree to work for the government in exchange for reduced sentences.
"After we make an arrest for someone cashing out at ATM machines, I’ll tell them they can go to jail for 10 years or they can come work for Team America," said Berglas.
The strategy doesn’t always work. Albert Gonzalez, the infamous TJ Maxx (TJX, Fortune 500) thief who stole 45 million credit card numbers and private information of 450,000 customers in 2007, was an FBI informant. He helped bring down a massive credit card theft scheme, but double-crossed the FBI, using insider information to help fellow criminals evade detection and carry out the TJ Maxx theft.
Security software also helps, but it far from solves the problem. To avoid detection, many cybercriminals will send out just a handful of viruses before modifying the code and sending it out again.
"The truth is that ‘fingerprint’ security technology is no longer effective," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of product development at Symantec. "The bad guys that got involved are organized professionals, and they figured out how to get around our technology."
Though Trollope said the new version of Norton’s antivirus software helps address the problem by scanning for files’ reputations, he said that Internet consumers also need know how how to keep their identities safe online.
"We do products really well, but the next step is education," said Trollope. "We can’t keep the Internet safe with antivirus software alone."
Warren Buffett praised the U.S. government Tuesday for its efforts to heal the economy, but the influential investor said he expects a slow recovery as consumers remain wary of spending.
Buffett said U.S. officials have done "a terrific job, all things considered" to help forestall the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
"We were right at the brink," Buffett told Carol Loomis, Fortune senior editor at large, at the magazine’s Most Powerful Women Summit in California. "This country was becoming not only dysfunctional, but nearly inoperative."
In fact, Bank of America chief executive Ken Lewis may have "inadvertently" helped save the financial system a year ago by arranging for BofA (BAC, Fortune 500) to buy troubled Merrill Lynch in "virtually a 24-hour period," according to Buffett.
If Lewis hadn’t, Buffett said Merrill "would have been gone in a nanosecond," joining Lehman Brothers in going out of business.
While he does not see the "green shoots" of economic renewal, Buffett said "I don’t see things getting worse either."
He said the housing market has shown signs of improvement and that markets in certain parts of the country could stabilize within a year.
But the pullback in consumer spending that has occurred as unemployment has risen to a 25-year high could remain in place for some time, he said free credit report without a credit card.
"I think that change in behavior is going to be long lasting, and that may mean that the recovery will be quite slow," he said.
Looking back, Buffett said the head of American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500) contacted him last year looking for help raising money shortly before the troubled insurer was rescued by the government.
"Don’t waste your time on me," Buffett told said he told Robert Willumstad, then the chief executive officer of AIG. "I’m not going to be able to do anything for you."
Buffett said he was also contacted by Barclays with a request to provide insurance for the British bank’s bid to buy Lehman Brothers last year. Buffett said he requested additional details from the bank but didn’t learn until 10 months later that a Barclays executive had tried to contact him on his cell phone, which he didn’t understand how to operate.
"Don’t try to get in touch with me by cell phone," he said.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A) invests in more than 70 businesses, including various insurance and reinsurance companies and public utilities.
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