Revere Digital

At the Code Conference, Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi and Harvey Mudd College President Maria Klawe highlighted the grand challenge of getting more students into coding, particularly females and minorities.

The nonprofit Code.org aims to boost computer science skills by making classes available in more schools. Specifically, they want to make coding part of the core curriculum in education, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. A growing amount of attention has been paid to getting more students interested in STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and math -- but both Partovi and Klawe said the effort is too broadly defined. There are more graduates than jobs in fields like biology and chemistry, but a yawning gap between graduating computer science students and open positions. “It drives me crazy when Obama says we need more STEM graduates,” Klawe said. “Because we overproduce in biology and chemistry in particular, and then they don’t get jobs that use any of that education.” She added that programming skills help students or professionals in any field they choose. “From my perspective, computer science is something that everyone needs,” she said.

SoftBank CEO and Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son continued his unusual campaign to convince regulators to let him buy T-Mobile but criticizing the US wireless market, broadband speeds and regulation at the Code Conference.

“Regulation in this country is wrong,” Son said, saying that telecommunications and anti-trust regulators have allowed an environment in which “the monopolist can become even more stronger.” Americans are satisfied with their Internet speeds because they don’t know any better, Son said, comparing it to Chinese people who have grown used to living under gray, smoggy skies. While the US dominated the 20th century because of its robust infrastructure -- both highway and electricity -- it’s falling behind now, he said.

Although Son wouldn’t say the word T-Mobile -- he just referred to his desire to buy an American wireless carrier -- he said that regulators haven’t been very excited about talking to him about his possible deal.

“They don’t want to see me,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about things like this.” One thing they might want to talk about is Son’s comment that he “provide network neutrality” on his network if he’s allowed to buy T-Mobile.

The Apple/Beats Electronics deal is now official, and Apple says it will spend up to $3 billion to buy the headphone maker and streaming music company.

Why? Because Apple likes the businesses Beats has already built, and wants to make new stuff with the help of its employees, says CEO Tim Cook.

“We could build about anything that you could dream of. But that’s not the question,” he said in an interview with Re/code. “The thing that Beats provides us is a head start, and it provides us with incredible people, kindred spirits.”

Apple says it will keep the Beats hardware brand intact, as well as the Beats Music streaming service. It also says Beats Electronics co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will join the company as full-time employees.

Apple says the deal will close by the end of its fiscal year, which means by the end of September 2014. It says the deal will be accretive in its next fiscal year.

Mary Meeker, the late-stage investor at Kleiner Perkins and longtime Internet analyst, presented the 2014 edition of her annual trends report at the Code Conference.

She observed that while huge growth spurts in people getting online and using smartphones may be ending, people really love to use the Internet from their phones, and that’s only growing faster.

According to data from various sources gathered by Meeker and her team, the total number of Internet users in the world is growing less than 10 percent per year and slowing. The number of smartphone users is growing 20 percent per year but also slowing.

ESPN has already said it may let you pay for its sports programming on the Web without subscribing to a traditional pay-TV package. Now it is floating the idea of selling some of its stuff directly to consumers, just like Netflix does.

ESPN boss John Skipper says that in 2015, the company may sell a package of Major League Soccer games to Web viewers, who could pay for the games without subscribing to ESPN itself. That would essentially replace the MLS Live service that the league currently markets to fans on its own, which costs $65 a season and gives subscribers digital access to most of the league’s games.

If ESPN goes through with those plans, it would mark the first time the network has served up sports on an a la carte basis. And if you’re a certain kind of TV-of-the-Future thinker, you can argue that it’s evidence that the bundle that supports the entire TV Industrial Complex is starting to unwind.

But the other way to look at ESPN’s trial balloon is that it shows the cable company’s commitment to the cable business model, where pay-TV subscribers pay a lot of money to get all of ESPN’s programming, and all of ESPN’s channels, whether or not they actually want ESPN. That’s because ESPN isn’t taking anything out of its bundle -- it’s just talking about adding a premium tier for a tiny slice of fans willing to pay extra.

With the influx of mergers-and-acquisitions activity in the marketing technology industry, there is a clear demand for technology that enables brands to more efficiently and more relevantly engage with their customers.

This demand stems from an important transformation currently taking place in the minds of the current and next wave of consumers regarding how they choose to interact with brands. With digital channels, social media and mobile communications, today’s millennial generation in particular orchestrates its own experience. Millennial consumers no longer follow predetermined, linear routes from exposure to conversion to brand advocate; rather, they utilize a variety of on- and offline channels to start, stop, rejoin and jump engagement levels, carving out highly individualized paths to purchase. As a result, the conventional marketing funnel is now irrelevant and traditional campaigns are extinct.

Forrester Research has even reported that we’re moving into a “post-campaign era,” where people despise and distrust push-style marketing methods that interrupt or intercept them -- 49 percent of consumers don’t trust digital ads, 38 percent don’t trust emails, and 36 percent don’t trust information in branded apps. Today, marketing success depends on customers seeing, engaging with and sharing content within their trusted social networks. No one is waiting to be wooed by elaborate campaigns. The challenge for marketers, then, is to break through the overcrowded personal junk filters set by millennials with relevant, targeted, valuable and non-promotional interactions.

[O'Neill, Chief Marketing Officer, SDL]

Four major Silicon Valley companies have formally agreed to pay $324.5 million to settle claims brought by employees accusing them of colluding not to poach each other’s talent.

The settlement, between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe Systems and roughly 64,000 workers, was disclosed in papers filed with the federal court in San Jose, California.

US District Judge Lucy Koh has been asked to preliminarily approve the accord at a June 19 hearing, over an objection by one of the four named plaintiffs. That plaintiff, Michael Devine, said the settlement let the companies off too easily. The settlement gives workers only a few thousand dollars each on average. The companies’ combined profit in their latest fiscal years was about $60 billion, with three-fifths coming from Apple.

There has been no shortage of outrage on the Internets about the Federal Communications Commission’s recent net neutrality proposal, which would allow broadband providers to offer fast-lane service to content companies. But do most people really care? A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggested that most Americans have no idea what net neutrality is or what all the fuss is about, since network and cable news shows have mostly ignored the debate.

According to Pew researchers, of the 2,820 news programs that aired on eight network and cable news channels from January thru May 12, just 25 programs mentioned the term net neutrality. Six of those programs were on Al Jazeera America which is, shall we say, thinly viewed.

[Commentary] The decision by the European Court of Justice, requiring Google to delete search results that display a Spanish user in a bad light, continues to cause consternation among online experts and supporters of free speech.

Unwittingly, the European Court appointed Google a global online censor, imposing on it the unenviable burden of policing content on the Web. In doing so, it furnished Google (and similar online intermediaries) with strikingly vague criteria and little process, to boot. And if understaffed privacy regulators intend to handle complaints case by case, they will soon be swamped by an unmanageable deluge of individual take-down requests.

But condemning the Court’s decision should not invalidate the concerns it sought to address.

In general, much of our information is subject to fairly clear norms that guide us in who can accessible what and for how long.

Why can’t technology do more to ensure that certain types of recorded data decays or becomes less accessible with time? Much more than law, technology can account for subtle differences in individuals’ subjective privacy expectations, which fluctuate based on the context and nuance of interpersonal relationships. Let’s have many more companies experiment with default settings that allow for data decay.

While these solutions are imperfect, they chart a promising path toward a world where some friction allows us to retain and hide a bit of ourselves.

[Polonetsky serves as executive director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum; Tene is vice president of research and education at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP)]

Tech industry hopes of a solution to the problem of patent trolls became more elusive when lawmakers gave up on patent legislation after being unable to reach a compromise on some details.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), announced he’s pulling the patent troll legislation for the foreseeable future because of an inability to resolve some outstanding issues.

“Unfortunately, there has been no agreement on how to combat the scourge of patent trolls on our economy without burdening the companies and universities who rely on the patent system every day to protect their inventions,” Sen Leahy said.

Disagreement between tech companies and universities over “fee shifting,” or who pays the legal fees when patent troll lawsuits fail, has been a stumbling block for lawmakers.