Posts Tagged ‘news-at-myspace’
MySpace International Head Travis Katz Is Out
More bad news at MySpace. As we await what are likely to be significant cuts in MySpace’s international headcount, MySpace International managing director Travis Katz is out, we’ve heard from a source in the UK. MediaWeek is also reporting this.
Katz joined MySpace in early 2006 as Vice President International, taking a SVP and Managing Director title in October 2006. He is responsible for all non-US operations for MySpace, IGN and other Fox Interactive Media properties. He grew staff from 2 to more than 400 in a span of 2 years.
How many of those 400 international employees will shortly be following? We’ll likely know soon. International employees were spared from the 30% layoffs last week due to legal requirements for notice in some countries, particularly in Europe. But the clock is still ticking on those employees.
I almost interviewed Katz at Davos earlier this year, but he was not available at the time of the interview. Former CEO Chris DeWolfe went solo.
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Clear In The DeadPool. So Much For Zipping Through Airport Security
So much for zipping through airport security for people willing to pay $199 per year and have their fingerprints and iris images scanned to be pre-approved.
Clear, the largest company to leverage the Registered Traveler program in the U.S., has “ceased operation” as of 11 pm PST today and their parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., is in the deadpool. They were “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” Users were notified this evening by email.
The service was popular - it was used 250,000 times at Washington, DC airports alone. Overall, the company said, over 2.5 million people were processed using Clear. It operated security lanes at 20 U.S. airports: Albany, Atlanta, Boston’s Logan, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York JFK, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Reno, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C.’s Reagan and Dulles, and Westchester.
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Let’s Talk Antitrust (on June 30)
Next week I’ll be interviewing antitrust expert Gary Reback on his new book Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). This is a HBSTech event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
This is the guy that represented Netscape in its epic legal battle with Microsoft in the nineties, and he was instrumental in convincing the U.S. government and a number of state attorneys general to sue Microsoft for antitrust violations.
In general he’s a proponent of ripping monopolies apart to keep competition strong. I’m generally less eager to kill off the companies that have won. It will definitely be a lively debate, and Google will be brought up more than once.
If you’d like to attend the event is free but has limited seating - register here. We should have archived video available after the event as well.
By the way, the book is an excellent read. It chronicles the big companies in silicon valley and reads more like a recent historical novel than a legal text. He can write.
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