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Beth Belton @bethbelton USA TODAY
BUSINESS SURVEILLANCE DOW JONES HACKED uIn a nutshell: Russian hackers penetrated servers at Dow Jones to steal information to make trades, Bloomberg reported Friday. uThe fallout: The FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the infiltration, the news organization reported. In a statement, Dow Jones said that since Bloomberg published its article, “we have worked hard to establish whether the allegations it contains are correct. To date, we have been unable to find evidence of any such investigation.” uThe upshot: This type of targeted white-collar hacking is on the rise, Ken Westin, a senior security analyst for Tripwire, a Portland, Ore.-based security company, told our Elizabeth Weise.
NEWS MONEY SPORTS LIFE AUTOS TRAVEL TECH SCENE BLOOMS IN IRELAND
L awrence J ournal -W orld - USA TODAY SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2015
Because of the can-do spirit in the Land of Poets, more than 1,500 tech companies are thriving there Jon Swartz
@jswartz USA TODAY
SPENCER PLATT, GETTY IMAGES
Wall Street faces a growing risk of white-collar hacking.
ON THE FRONT BURNER SWIPE RIGHT FOR AN IPO Match Group, the dating company that owns Tinder, Match.com and OkCupid, has filed to go public. The company will trade under the ticker symbol MTCH. A price has not been set. The initial place-holder amount in the filing was $100 million. Match Group owns more than 45 dating brands with 59 million monthly active users in 190 countries, the company said. It had 4.7 million paid members as of the quarter that ended Sept. 30.
ODD ANDERSEN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Martin Winterkorn now also resigning his Porsche post.
IN THE HOT SEAT WINTERKORN STEPS DOWN Volkswagen’s former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, is stepping down as head of Porsche, the holding company owned by the Porsche and Piech families that control a majority of the German auto group’s voting stock said Saturday. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the move comes less than a month after Winterkorn resigned as chief executive of Volkswagen after the automaker admitted it manipulated emissions tests of some diesel-powered cars and light trucks in the U.S. and Europe. The company is under investigation on suspicion of fraud in both the U.S. and Germany and is gearing up to launch a massive recall of up to 11 million vehicles. USA SNAPSHOTS©
Legal marijuana
81% of employers aren’t concerned that employees will come to work under the influence.
Source EMPLOYERS survey of 500 small businesses JAE YANG AND PAUL TRAP, USA TODAY
DUBLIN Web Summit helped put Ireland on the tech map. An annual gathering that draws the likes of Bono, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, it celebrates ideas, big personalities and the joys of the pub crawl. “I believe in chasing rainbows,” says Paddy Cosgrave, the indefatigable intellectual who founded the conference and acts as its host. Today it’s considered one of the pre-eminent tech shows of the year, a civilized alternative to bloated gatherings such as CES and Mobile World Congress. When Web Summit decided to leave Dublin, after five years, for the warmer climes of Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2016, it sent ripples through the Irish tech community. (A U.S. companion show, Collision, is departing Las Vegas for New Orleans next year.) The move to Portugal is considered by some a symbolic and financial blow to the local economy, which hauled in $110 million during Web Summit 2014. But it’s a loss the increasingly vibrant tech economy here can handle, with start-ups blooming and an avalanche of American tech companies establishing operations. Amid the relocation and recriminations, Ireland’s tech scene is growing — whether at Silicon Docks, the home of Google, Facebook and Twitter’s local operations, or throughout Dublin, where a herd of start-ups are gaining traction. The European island offers the lure of minimal regulation and significantly lower corporate tax rates (12.5% vs. 35% in the U.S.), a
JON SWARTZ, USA TODAY
Dublin’s tech scene offers the lure of minimal regulation.
puters and other devices major reason why top across multiple counU.S. tech companies — tries without steep including Apple, Google, roaming charges. Amazon, Facebook, YaIts spare office in the hoo, Microsoft, Twitter and eBay — have corpoSandyford suburb is rate facilities in Ireland, crammed with several where they employ dozen employees, festhousands. tooned with inspirationCUBIC TELECOM Yet Dublin’s thriving al quotes on the wall start-up community will Barry Napier from Steve Jobs and greatly determine the others. fate and fortunes of this A quote above Cubic’s business narrative. They entrance sums up its employ more workers convivial culture: “Evand are greatly intereryone brings joy to this office. Some when they twined in the national enter, others when they economy. leave.” “We’re a small, little There’s a certain hint company on an island of bravura surrounding with a loud voice,” says EUGENE LANGAN Cubic and for good reaBarry Napier, CEO of CuBen Hurley son: Tesla, Hewlettbic Telecom, a 54-person Packard, Qualcomm and outfit that plans to double in size next year and be worth Walmart are among its partners $500 million to $1 billion within a and customers. Cubic’s quick path to success is year. “We’re street fighters.” Think of Cubic Telecom as the illustrative of a can-do spirit in Switzerland of Ireland’s tech the Land of Poets, where there start-up scene. It’s a third-party are more than 1,500 tech compaprovider of technology that con- nies today, according to entreprenects mobile devices, cars, com- neurs and venture capitalists,
JON SWARTZ, USA TODAY
though official statistics are hard to find. “There is a growing fusion (in Ireland) of human capital and venture capital; we’re building an innovative ecosystem,” says Ben Hurley, CEO of early-stage investor NDRC. He’s seated in a conference room at Digital Exchange, an accelerator for about a dozen start-ups located in a rustic building constructed from 1879 to 1883 that used to be part of St. James’s Gate Brewery, where Guinness is made. Its residents include security firm Sensipass and Chasing Returns, a program to parse behavioral data of retail traders. Within the co-working space, entrepreneurs work together, listen to lectures and welcome mentoring from established companies. The after-hours scene is much the same. The previous evening, adjacent to the House of Lords, about 25 hopeful start-ups — parcel-tracking service Xpreso and Optrace, a maker of serialized holographic labels, among them — gathered to make elevator pitches, share in sausage bites and pine for fame and fortune. “These events are more common as our industry grows here,” says Tom Farrell, vice president of marketing at Swrve, an exhibitor. Mobile-games developer Swrve, like many start-ups based in Dublin, has set up shop in San Francisco, a tacit admission of the importance of establishing a beachhead in Silicon Valley. But no one expects instant riches. Ireland must contend with nearby London for engineering talent and it faces the Sisyphean task of competing with exotic venues such as Barcelona and Lisbon for lucrative tech shows. “See these blotches on my face?” says Napier, who plans to open a Cubic office in San Francisco next year. “They come from stress. I go on vacation, they go away. Once I’m back at work, they return. That’s the nature of working at a start-up.” Such are the vagaries of creating hardware and software in Ireland.
‘Vulture fund’ gets an image reboot Record EMC deal was also notable for sheer lack of drama Kaja Whitehouse USA TODAY
NEW YORK Before helping to spur a record-breaking technology merger between Dell and EMC, hedge fund Elliott Management was best known for hardball investing tactics, such as when it seized an Argentine navy ship as payback for debts owed. But Elliott’s role in securing EMC shareholders a record $67 billion price tag without so much as raising its voice could help revamp the $27 billion hedge fund’s image at a time when activist investors, who push for changes that could boost stocks, are tripping over themselves to look like team players. After buying a 2.2% stake in EMC last summer, Elliott’s Jesse Cohn wrote EMC’s board a letter identifying problems he said could be resolved by EMC spinning off assets or pursuing a
merger. Three months after the October 2014 letter, the data storage company agreed to put two people recommended by Elliott on its board of directors, without a bitter proxy fight. And on Monday, EMC announced plans to merge with Dell in a $67 billion deal that Cohn, who heads Elliott’s U.S. activist investing unit, said he supported and would not oppose. The sheer lack of drama was notable for a hedge fund firm whose high-profile tussles have left it and its billionaire founder, Paul Singer, with reputations as cutthroat adversaries. Elliott is “best known for its highly contentious activist battles,” according to hedge fund publication Institutional Investor’s Alpha. Singer, the newsletter said, is known as “a tenacious adversary who is not afraid to fight battles, often using the legal system.” But experts say that the harmonious nature of Elliott’s dealings with EMC comes as no surprise, and that Elliott’s reputation as a bruiser has been exaggerated by the high-profile nature
REMY STEINEGGER, SWISS-IMAGE.CH
Paul Singer, billionaire founder of hedge fund Elliott Management, often has sought solutions via the legal system.
Elliott is “best known for its highly contentious activist battles.” Institutional Investor’s Alpha
of its most contentious battles. “The average person who has heard of Elliott knows of Elliott as the hedge fund that stole the boat and for putting creditors over a barrel,” says Ken Squire, founder of 13DMonitor, which tracks activist investors. “But Elliot has never been a guns-blazing activist,” he said of its efforts to push for changes at specific companies, known as activist investing. Indeed, Elliott has waged proxy campaigns — an indication of bad blood with companies targeted — 25% of the time, according to data from FactSet. That’s below Carl Icahn’s record for waging proxy battles 37% of the time, and hedge fund Starboard Value’s record for doing so 58% of the time, FactSet said. Perhaps not surprisingly, people at Elliott say they agree. “Constructive, collaborative dialogue is by far our preferred way to do things,” Cohn told USA TODAY. “We came out with a thesis and kept an open mind, and the company remained engaged and thoughtful throughout the process.”