- Ola shuts TaxiForSure unit, lays off up to 1,000 people: Cab-hailing company Ola has shut its TaxiForSure unit and is laying off as many as 1,000 employees, as the SoftBank Group Corp-backed firm tightens its belt to take on US-based rival Uber. According to at least half-a-dozen people with the direct knowledge of the development, about 90% of the staff being laid off from TaxiForSure works in the company’s call centres, driver relations and business development units. The employees that are being retrenched are located across a dozen cities and are being given three months’ salary as compensation, said the people mentioned above. These include current and former employees of the cab hailing company.Ola had acquired smaller rival TaxiForSure for $200 million in early 2015 to strengthen its position against Uber Technologies Inc. After the acquisition, Ola had centralized TaxiForSure’s operations to three major cities–Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi–and eight smaller cities. The company kept around 250 employees each in the three metros and around 30 each in the eight other cities. The layoff and shutdown comes at a time when Ola is locked in a bruising battle with Uber that involved public spats and legal wrangling. It is also dealing with adverse regulatory environment in various states that affect its operations. The company has been trying for a large fundraise for quite some time. Ola has so far raised around $1.2 billion from investors including Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. The taxi-hailing firm was valued around $5 billion at the time of its last fundraising. Although Ola had initially planned to retain TaxiForSure as a separate brand, resource crunch seems to have forced the company to wind down the unit. The people cited above said that drivers on TaxiForSure have been moved to the Ola platform. The company has also been prompting TaxiForSure users to migrate to the Ola app in recent months.
- Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN: Cisco is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Cisco, which had more than 70,000 employees as of April 30, declined to comment. Cisco increasingly requires "different skill sets" for the "software-defined future" than it did in the past, as it pushes to capture a higher share of the addressable market and aims to boost its margins, the CRN report said citing a source familiar with the situation. Cisco has been investing in new products such as data analytics software and cloud-based tools for data centers, to offset the impact of sluggish spending by telecom carriers and enterprises on its main business of making network switches and routers. The company has already offered many early retirement package plans to Cisco's employees, according to CRN.
- Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years: At a news conference on Tuesday at the company’s research center in Palo Alto, Calif., Mark Fields, Ford’s chief executive, said the company planned to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation in a ride-hailing service by 2021.Beyond that, Mr. Fields’s announcement was short on specifics. But he said that the vehicles Ford envisioned would be radically different from those that populate American roads now. “That means there’s going to be no steering wheel. There’s going to be no gas pedal. There’s going to be no brake pedal,’’ he said. “If someone had told you 10 years ago, or even five years ago, that the C.E.O. of a major automaker American car company is going to be announcing the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles, they would have been called crazy or nuts or both.” The company also said on Tuesday that as part of the effort, it planned to expand its Palo Alto center, doubling the number of employees who work there over the next year, from the current 130. Ford also said it had acquired an Israeli start-up, Saips, that specializes in computer vision, a crucial technology for self-driving cars. And the automaker announced investments in three other companies involved in major technologies for driverless vehicles.
- Univision is buying Gawker Media for $135 million: Univision has won the auction for Gawker Media. The TV network and digital publisher has agreed to pay $135 million for the bankrupt blog network, according to a person familiar with the deal. Univision’s offer will encompass all seven of Gawker Media’s sites, including Gawker.com Ziff Davis and Univision were the only two bidders for Gawker, which filed for bankruptcy after Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel won a $140 million judgment in a privacy case. Ziff Davis had originally offered $90 million for Gawker Media. The deal won’t be official for a bit. For starters, a U.S. bankruptcy court judge needs to sign off on the transaction. When it is final, the judgment funds will be set aside while Gawker appeals its court case; eventually the money will go to the side that wins. Whatever the result of the case, the auction is a disappointing conclusion for Denton, who founded the company in 2002. Last year, as rival media companies like Vice, BuzzFeed and Vox Media (which owns this site) were raising money at increasingly high valuations, Denton was arguing that his company was worth $250 million or more.
- ‘Shadow Brokers’ Leak Raises Alarming Question: Was the N.S.A. Hacked? The release on websites this week of what appears to be top-secret computer code that the National Security Agency has used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets has caused deep concern inside American intelligence agencies, raising the question of whether America’s own elite operatives have been hacked and their methods revealed. Most outside experts who examined the posts, by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, said they contained what appeared to be genuine samples of the code — though somewhat outdated — used in the production of the N.S.A.’s custom-built malware.Most of the code was designed to break through network firewalls and get inside the computer systems of competitors like Russia, China and Iran. That, in turn, allows the N.S.A. to place “implants” in the system, which can lurk unseen for years and be used to monitor network traffic or enable a debilitating computer attack. According to these experts, the coding resembled a series of “products” developed inside the N.S.A.’s highly classified Tailored Access Operations unit, some of which were described in general terms in documents stolen three years ago by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now living in Russia. But the code does not appear to have come from Mr. Snowden’s archive, which was mostly composed of PowerPoint files and other documents that described N.S.A. programs. The documents released by Mr. Snowden and his associates contained no actual source code used to break into the networks of foreign powers. Whoever obtained the source code apparently broke into either the top-secret, highly compartmentalized computer servers of the N.S.A. or other servers around the world that the agency would have used to store the files. The code that was published on Monday dates to mid-2013, when, after Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, the agency shuttered many of its existing servers and moved code to new ones as a security measure. While still widely considered the most talented group of state-sponsored hackers in the world, the N.S.A. is still recovering from Mr. Snowden’s disclosures; it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars reconfiguring and locking down its systems.
