WASHINGTON — Passengers love the idea, but airlines hate it. The government wants to require that travelers be told up-front about basic services that are not included in the price of a ticket and how much extra they will cost.

The Transportation Department proposed Wednesday that passengers be provided detailed information on fees for a first checked bag, a second checked bag, advance seat assignments, and carry-on bags.

The rules would apply whether passengers bought tickets on the phone, in person, or online — and not just from airline websites. Airlines that want their tickets to remain available through travel agents and online ticketing services would have to provide them information on fees for basic services, too, something most have been reluctant to do.

The idea is to prevent consumers from being lured by low advertised airfares, only to be surprised later by high fees for services once considered part of the ticket price. Airlines currently are required to disclose only bag fees, and even then they do not have to provide an exact price. Some provide a wide range of possible fees.

‘‘A customer can buy a ticket for $200 and find themselves with a hidden $100 baggage fee, and they might have turned down a $250 ticket with no baggage fee, but the customer was never able to make that choice,’’ Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in an interview.

But adopting the changes would be the wrong choice, said a trade association for the airline industry.

The “proposal overreaches and limits how free markets work,’’ Airlines for America said in a statement. And it predicted ‘‘negative consequences.’’

Under the proposal, fees would have to be specific to the advertised airfare. Any frequent-flier privileges would also have to be factored into the price if the airfare is advertised on an airline website and the passenger supplies identifying information. The proposal would prohibit ‘‘unfair and deceptive’’ practices by airfare search tools, such as ranking flights by some airlines ahead of others without disclosing that bias to consumers.

The rule does not cover fees for early boarding and other services regarded as optional.

The government also wants to expand its definition of a ‘‘ticket agent,’’ so that consumer protection rules also apply to online flight search tools such as Kayak and Google’s Flight Search, even though they do not actually sell tickets. Many consumers are unable to determine the true cost of a ticket because fees are often hard to find, the government says.

‘‘The more you arm the consumer with information, the better the consumer’s position to make choices,’’ said Foxx.

The public has 90 days to comment on the proposal. Foxx said he hopes the rule will become final within the next year.

In the meantime, airlines have taken their case to Congress. A House committee recently approved a bill that would effectively nullify the rule and allow airlines to return to displaying base fares and adding in taxes and fees later.

Summary: WASHINGTON — Passengers love the idea, but airlines hate it. The government wants to require that travelers be told upfront about basic services that aren’t included in the price of a ticket and how much extra they’ll cost. The Transportation Department proposed Wednesday that passengers be provided detailed information on fees for a first checked bag, a second checked bag, advance seat assignments, and carry-on bags.


Retail disasters come in different forms. Walk into a J.C. Penney store these days, and you’re likely to see an appealing work in progress, with lovely signage, spiffy layouts, and popular brand-name merchandise beautifully displayed. It shouts, “I’m soooo trendy.” Walk into a Sears or a Kmart, by contrast, and you’re likely to see the department store equivalent of tumbleweeds: scuffed floors and indifferent merchandise plopped sloppily onto tables and shelves amid a dingy atmosphere. It wheezes, “Time has passed me by.”

But these retailers have several things in common. One, easily visible, is a woeful lack of customers. A second, which you don’t see but helps account for the parlous state in which the chains find themselves: They’re all heavily influenced by Wall Street guys who convinced themselves — and, for a while, a whole lot of others — that they understand what Main Street wants. And they’ve gotten it wrong.

We’re dealing here with two big investors who are polar opposites in personality and approach. There’s the flashy Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management. Two years ago he used his hefty stake in Penney to muscle its board into hiring Ron Johnson, creator of the mega-successful chain of Apple retail stores, who in turn has embarked on a radical, so far disastrous strategy. And there’s the reclusive Eddie Lampert of ESL Investments. Earlier this year he appointed himself acting chief executive of Sears Holdings SHLD , which owns Sears and Kmart. But the two Wall Streeters, so different in many ways, are alike in thinking that they have the talent and the chops to give a troubled national retail chain what it needs to succeed. So far, at least, they haven’t come close.

Both Ackman and Lampert became billionaires by being brilliant investors, bland both got into retailing by amassing big stakes in companies they thought were selling for way less than their assets were worth. Under Ackman’s influence, J.C. Penney JCP is spending heavily to upgrade its stores from dowdy to delightful, while Lampert is slowly milking a dwindling asset and revenue base at Sears. Both companies now find themselves in serious trouble.

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By now the Perils of Penney has become a familiar tale. After soaring on the appointment of CEO Johnson, Penney stock has collapsed in recent weeks. It has fallen 30% in less than a month, following a disastrous fourth-quarter earnings report. It’s down 60% since Johnson brazenly claimed in January 2012 that he would transform the gradually fading chain into “America’s favorite store.”

Ackman’s ally at JCP (as it now wants to be called), Steve Roth of Vornado Realty Trust, abruptly sold 40% of the company’s stake in March; a Macy’s lawsuit over plans to open Martha Stewart “stores” inside JCP locations drags on, temporarily leaving a gaping hole in hundreds of Penneys; and on March 14, lender CIT signaled its skepticism about the company’s finances by reportedly boosting the cost for vendors to borrow against payments that Penney owes them.

Johnson swept into Penney in November 2011 with the celebratory air of a revolutionary rolling into a vanquished capital. A few months later he hosted a gala relaunch of the brand, a Penneypalooza modeled after the Apple AAPL fests held by his former boss Steve Jobs. (Even Jobs might have considered this one excessive.) Johnson proclaimed that he would reinvent the department store and do so while keeping earnings intact. His most radical moves were to stop running sales, which he said tricked customers, and to try to persuade the bargain addicted to trust that the new “fair and square” JCP would offer lower prices even if its price tags showed no mark-downs. He killed off older brands and signed hipper names like Joe Fresh, announced a new store-within-a-store design, and launched a bold and pricey ad campaign.

The plan aroused a lot of fascination because national department store chains are in such long-term decline that any fresh approach merits consideration. But Johnson talked the board into abandoning decades of practices and changing the whole company at once without testing it first. “You never, ever do a new concept across the board automatically,” says Gilbert Harrison, chairman of Financo, an investment bank that specializes in retail companies. “Before [Johnson] could roll it out, he needed to better train his customers.”

MORE: There are no superhero CEOs

Johnson was undaunted by any suggestion that he needed to take some time or that he should refrain from touting JCP’s new stores until the company had overhauled more than a handful of them. “The only things that haven’t worked for me are when I’ve held back,” he told Fortune during the brand’s relaunch. (Johnson declined to be interviewed for this article.) “There’s no reason to sell an idea short. The only risk would be to not fulfill the dream.”

Johnson’s call to arms — with the enthusiastic support of Ackman, who with Vornado owned about 36% of the stock (some of it through derivatives) before the latter reduced its position — was based on Apple’s approach to retail: Sell must-have products that people line up to buy, helped by a great in-store experience. There was a crucial difference: Apple sells sleek miracles of functionality and glamour. J.C. Penney sells sweatpants and tube socks.

There are always casualties in revolutions. In this case, unfortunately, it was the core customer, who had long trusted J.C. Penney as a great place for a deal on basic, unfussy stuff. Effectively, Johnson fired the old shoppers without first winning over any new ones. Need proof? The past four quarters reveal a breathtaking decline in same-store sales, which plummeted 19% in the company’s first quarter and accelerated to 32% in the fourth quarter, which is when stores make most of their money.

Now, after seeing overall sales decline by an astonishing 25% — $4.3 billion — in the past year, Johnson & Co. are retrenching (sort of) by bringing back clearance prices and coupons. Ken Hannah, chief financial officer, recently offered a modified mea culpa at an investor presentation: “This is a multi-year journey, and we certainly made our mistakes.”

Penney’s board clearly blundered by entrusting the company’s fate to a leader who was dynamic but had no experience as a chief executive. Although Myron Ullman III, then Penney’s CEO, was originally supposed to stay for a while as chairman, confusion about who was running the show led the company to change course. Ullman resigned in January 2012, two months after Johnson’s tenure began.

Hiring Johnson was a classic Street turnaround play: Recruit a hot manager from outside the company, hand him massive financial incentives, and set him loose. The board gave Johnson $50 million of Penney stock to make up for $50 million in Apple shares he left behind. Johnson also shelled out $50 million of his own money to buy a warrant giving him the right to buy 7.3 million shares at $29.92 from mid-2017 through late 2018. Already wealthy from his tenure at Apple, Johnson took that huge flier seeking mega-riches. It also conveyed that he was willing to wager his own money on his audacious revival plan.

At first it seemed like a win: On the June 14, 2011, announcement of his hiring, the stock ran up 17%, putting him ahead more than $30 million on paper. Today, at JCP’s recent price of $15.50, the stock has to rise about 150% just for him to get his $50 million back. (You can find the math here.) The guys who hired him are way down too: Ackman is looking at a paper loss of $550 million on his $1.55 billion investment, while Vornado is down about $260 million. Says Ackman: “Retail turnarounds are difficult and take time.”

In contrast to Ackman and Roth, who began buying their Penney’s stake less than three years ago, Lampert has been dealing with his retail company for more than a decade. He’s way, way ahead on his investment; we estimate at least 300%. He started by buying Kmart debt in 2002, at undisclosed prices, while the company was in bankruptcy.

His hedge fund owned more than half of Kmart’s stock when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2003. A major attraction was Kmart’s real estate, which had far more value then to bricks-and-mortar merchants than it does now, with Amazon AMZN and its online brethren eating physical retailers alive.

Then, in 2005, after Kmart stock had surged from its original post-bankruptcy $15 to triple digits, Lampert got Kmart to buy Sears. That gave Lampert even more real estate and a batch of attractive assets, such as the Craftsman tool line. The bullish story, repeated endlessly at the time, was that Lampert would be the next Warren Buffett, redeploying capital generated by fading stores the way Buffett redeployed capital from Berkshire Hathaway’s brk.a original fading (and now closed) textile business.

Lampert didn’t discourage this. He took to writing long, discursive letters about the company and his views of life, similar to Buffett’s Berkshire reports. He was famously intrusive, saying yay or nay on even relatively minor investments. Lampert ran through three chief executives in eight years before becoming acting CEO in January — a title he probably should have assumed years before.

MORE: Customers to retailers: ‘Don’t spam me, bro!”

For all his smarts, Lampert failed to hire a strong, topnotch retail CEO to run his company. Time and again, he has been able to articulate a financial strategy for his investors; he has rarely been able to offer more than a cursory nod at a retail strategy — a reason that customers should shop at Sears or Kmart. That deficiency is evident in the company’s results. In 2005, Sears generated $49.1 billion in revenue and $858 million in profits. In 2012 revenue slumped to $39.9 billion and Sears lost $1.1 billion.

You can also argue that Lampert didn’t do all that well at his core competency: asset deployment. Rather than put lots of money into new stores and upgrades — which he said over and over in his annual letters wasn’t an efficient use of capital — he had Sears spend a ton of cash buying back stock. By our count, Sears has spent $6.1 billion to repurchase stock, more than 60% above the $3.7 billion spent on capital expenditures on stores during that period. Shortly after buying Sears, Lampert launched a program called Sears Essentials, rebranding existing Kmarts and stocking them with Sears products in order to compete with smaller-format stores. It bombed. “Had Sears Essentials worked, we would have put much more money into the physical stores,” Lampert tells Fortune.

The average cost of the repurchases: a bit over $100 a share, roughly double the recent price. To be fair, some $5 billion of the buybacks occurred before the financial crisis hit and Sears’ cash flow began to dry up. But a capital allocator is paid to get it right, and in this case he didn’t.

Sears is trying to recover with its latest attempt to mix physical stores with online retailing, shopyourway.com, which combines social media with a loyalty program. But most other national retailers are attempting some version of this. Will Sears get it right? Who knows? But some of the money it spent buying back stock would come in handy right now.

At Sears Holdings’ recent price of about $52, Lampert is way less ahead than he was in 2007, when the stock was at $170. There’s no reason to believe the stock will be returning to that level anytime soon, if ever.

The idea that if investors make money, everything works out for the best for everyone doesn’t hold in all cases. Lampert has made a ton of money, as have some of his early investors. “It’s been a better investment than people think,” he says, “but the company hasn’t been a success yet.”

MORE: Here’s how you kill a product gracefully

In both the J.C. Penney and Sears Holdings sagas, there are lots of losers: vendors, communities with abandoned or failing stores, and, above all, employees. Says Ed Cox, a former Penney network engineer whose 32-year career ended abruptly when he was laid off last April: “I was very emotional that day. On those employee-engagement surveys done every year they said, ‘Do you see yourself retiring at J.C. Penney?’ and I always said yes.” Adds his former colleague Lee Stoeckert, who took a buyout: “They always said it was going to take three years, but not that it was going to crash and burn in the meantime.”

Today the two American retailing icons look further from revival than they did when Lampert and Ackman entered the picture. The winners so far, in addition to Lampert and his early investors, are the chains’ competitors. They include Macy’s M , Kohl’s KSS , Target TGT , and TJX TJX , all of which are run by traditional retailers, not hedge fund guys or their designees.

There’s still time for Ackman and Johnson to prove us wrong. Any number of factors could change Penney’s momentum. The company could emerge with a favorable result from the Martha Stewart litigation. There are whispers afoot of a significant refinancing, which could remove doubt about its ability to renew its revolving line of credit next year. Customers could come flooding in as the store makeovers are completed. Or not.

Whatever happens, here’s the bottom line to this convoluted tale: Retailing is a lot harder than it looks from Wall Street.

Disclosure: Co-author Allan Sloan owns $115,000 of TJX and Target stock, purchased well before this article was conceived.

This story is from the April 08, 2013 issue of Fortune.

Summary: Sears and J.C. Penney are two vastly different case studies of what happens when hedge fund guys control big retail chains. The results, however, are the same.


Fans of TV, along with fans of all things that aren’t gross, have learned to block the image out of their minds. CBS certainly blocked it out back in the summer of 2000, with the help of a perfectly placed dab of pixelization. I’m referring to the infamous nudity of “Survivor” contestant Richard Hatch, who felt that competing in the raw, wearing nothing but his snide grin, would somehow give him an edge over his competitors.

And indeed, he streaked to victory.

Turns out, that icon-ick Hatch blur was the shape of things to come. Now naked-centric reality TV shows have proliferated, from TLC’s “Buying Naked” and VH1’s “Naked Dating” to “Naked and Afraid” on the Discovery Channel (below), last fall’s “Naked Vegas” on Syfy, and the upcoming “Skin Wars” on GSN. Other “Survivor” players have shed their clothes over the years, as have many bachelors and bachelorettes who’ve been within reach of champagne and a hot tub after sundown, but now the nudity is the marquee attraction.

Some 15 years into reality TV, the reality producing powers have pretty much lost their imaginations when it comes to juicing the genre with gimmicks. Nudity makes those all-star editions, fake-out twists, and superstar judges look like the height of ingenuity. Producers saw that “Naked and Afraid,” about naked couples surviving in the wild, was a hit last summer, and now nude is the new tack. The dating shows have gotten boring? Then have the models — I mean contestants — do stripteases.

There has always been something porny about reality TV, which essentially throws a bunch of extroverts together so we can watch them strut, clash, and maybe bonk. But this new development is an open acknowledgment of that soft-core promise of skin and sex. When the couples meet on “Naked Dating” and “Naked and Afraid,” they often try not to look down, but viewers are looking down big-time. We tune in to get turned on.

One interesting tension about watching these shows is that we really aren’t seeing full nudity, even while the people are nude. We’re seeing Barbie and Ken. We’re playing eye games with the pixels, constantly trying to see through the blurring, wondering if the editor might have missed a little something around the edges. On “Buying Naked,” which follows nudist home buyers in Florida, the producers also take a page from the “Austin Powers” movies and rely heavily — even comically — on the careful positioning of props, including candles, leaves, and plates of food. On GSN’s body-painting competition “Skin Wars,” which starts Aug. 6, the flesh is covered in colors, just as it was on “Naked Vegas.”

Unlike online porn, the naked reality shows toy with titillation, coyly making us look and then look more in a pointless game of erotic hide and seek — the full-ish Monty.

Just so you know, I did try to find a positive side to reality nudity, before I accepted it as ratings-grabbing, bottom-feeding stupidity. For one thing, we have a huge body-image issue in this country, and TV shows that might reveal differently shaped real people who are comfortable out of their clothes could be a cultural plus. We’re inundated with unrealistically thin bodies; perhaps these shows could counter that impossible standard. Perhaps they could help undo body shame. Alas, all of the bodies are tight, except perhaps on “Buying Naked,” where a few of the nudists do display belly jiggle. “Reality” and “reality TV” stopped talking to each other a long time ago, and generally speaking the bodies on the naked reality shows are no more warts-and-all than on the bathing-suited reality shows.

I also thought that, perhaps, nudity would alter the dynamics between the adventure seekers on “Naked and Afraid,” the singles on “Naked Dating,” and maybe even the negotiators on “Buying Naked.” As “Naked Dating” host Amy Paffrath says to the daters on the show’s premiere, nudity should “allow you to date in the most honest way possible.” Or as Joe, the show’s first bachelor, puts it, “There’s no secrets — you see me, I see you, boom.” Does not wearing clothes make us more vulnerable? Or, as Richard Hatch argued, does it make us more intimidating? By removing that last layer of fabric, does it somehow make us different people?

The answer is probably yes to all three questions — but not on reality TV. It has become abundantly clear that the idea of reality shows as social experiments has grown silly and false, if it ever contained any truth. Reality players have become too self-conscious, too aware of playing a TV character, to be natural on screen and let an experiment play out. And reality producers and editors are too intent on creating story lines to give us honest explorations of human dynamics. The early promise by “The Real World” that we would “find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real” is now quite absurd.

Nudity changes nothing when it comes to going on TV in order to get attention and, maybe, a People magazine photo. With or without clothes, Adam and Eve are still waiting for their close-up.

Summary: Naked-centric reality TV shows have proliferated, from TLC’s “Buying Naked” and VH1’s “Naked Dating” to “Naked and Afraid” on the Discovery Channel, last fall’s “Naked Vegas” on Syfy, and the upcoming “Skin Wars” on GSN.


While debate about the name of Washington's NFL team has heated up significantly the past few years, one man associated with the league has been silently protesting since 2007.

That man is Mike Carey, who recently retired after a 19-year career as an NFL referee. According to Washington Post columnist Mike Wise, Carey asked out of Redskins assignments because of his disdain for the team's name. He didn't work a preseason or regular-season Washington game, home or away, since the opening week of the 2006 season.

“It just became clear to me that to be in the middle of the field, where something disrespectful is happening, was probably not the best thing for me,” Carey told Wise.

Carey was one of the more distinguished officials during his time in the league, and in 2008 he was named with Ed Hochuli as the best referee in the game in an ESPN coaches poll. That same year he became the first African-American referee to work a Super Bowl.

Carey told Wise he didn't make the request directly to league commissioner Roger Goodell, instead he spoke with a person involved with officiating schedules (he would not reveal a name). He didn't know if Goodell or anyone within Washington's organization was even familiar with his request.

“I think everybody has to look inside themselves and decide what is the right thing for them," Carey told Wise. “In America, we’ve learned that respect is the most important thing that you have. I learned it from my parents, my schools, from my faith. And when you learn there’s something that might not be as respectful as you like, when you come to terms with it, you have to do something about it.”

In a telling sign of just how polarizing this debate has become, shortly before Wise's column made its rounds another story was published that detailed former Bears coach Mike Ditka's strong opposition to the Redskins changing their name.

Ditka told RedskinsHistorian.com that he doesn't understand the "stink" over the supposedly derogatory name.

“It’s so much [expletive] it’s incredible," Ditka, now an ESPN analyst, said. "We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world. It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian. Even though it was called a Redskin, what are you going to call them, a Proudskin? This is so stupid it's appalling, and I hope that owner keeps fighting for it and never changes it, because the Redskins are part of an American football history, and it should never be anything but the Washington Redskins. That’s the way it is."

Carey will work for CBS this season as a rules commentator.

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Summary: While debate about the name of Washington's NFL team has heated up significantly the past few years, one man associated with the league has been silen...


The fusion of cutting edge hardware and radical user interface improvements proves iOS has catching up to do.

Depending on who you asked at yesterday’s Android Honeycomb launch event in Mountain View, California, the latest upgrade to Google’s GOOG mobile OS was either a revelation or another iterative upgrade.

Some of the attendees I spoke to shrugged when I asked what they thought.

“Looks like just the next natural step for the OS,” said one.

Interestingly enough, none of those questioned actually owned iPads. Now if you’re one of the millions who use Apple’s AAPL popular tablet regularly, you’ll likely agree it’s probably changed the way you interact with media: you’re probably more likely to check email or read your favorite blogs on the couch, in bed, or on a plane. And those stats about enterprise adoption probably aren’t lying: 80 of the Fortune 100 companies are testing out or using the iPad in the corporate workplace. In fact, I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve had with executives and press reps who swear by it and then proceed to give an entire presentation on the device.

I’ve owned an iPad for 10 months now, and I’ll be the first to tell you that I didn’t really view it as more than a luxury item until recently. Sure, it’s lighter than my MacBook Pro and still lighter than the recently introduced MacBook Airs by at least half a pound, but it was only until I started traveling more for work and pleasure did I realize its true utility. In between meetings and at launch events, I’m perfectly comfortable banging out emails, sending instant messages to my colleagues, and catching up on the latest tech news in the blogosphere.

Then Honeycomb came along. You’ll be forgiven for seeing the leaked preview footage and thinking it’s just another OS update because it’s not until you actually see Honeycomb up close and play with it on a device like Motorola’s Xoom that you realize just how limited the iPad experience remains.

There are some real reasons to be excited about Honeycomb from both a hardware and software perspective:

Xoom, xoom, xoom. Motorola’s MMI tablet was first introduced last month at CES, and after tinkering with several units for a good half hour, let me tell you, the future of tablets looks promising, at least if the Xoom is anything to go by. We’re talking beefy specs: a 10.1-inch capacitive touch screen with an improved resolution of 1280×800 — the iPad sports a 9.7-inch display with a 1,024 by 768 resolution — a 5MP HD camcorder with a front-facing cam, and a dual-core ARM-based Tegra 2 chipset, all housed in a sexy black chassis that’s just a hair thicker than the iPad and probably one or two ounces heavier. Given all the hardware features you’re getting, the higher resolution and extra half-inch of physical display, it’s certainly not an unreasonable tradeoff. Besides, it’s not like the iPad was ever a heifer by any stretch of the imagination, anyway.

Better multitasking. Not the weird gimpy version featured in iOS that only quickens the app-swapping experience but doesn’t actually keep apps besides say, Pandora, actively running in the background. Also, pressing the home button to swap between apps is fine, but feels less-than-ideal. With Honeycomb, a virtual button tap shows apps you’re running (and recently run) with large, live preview tiles that appear on the left side of the screen.

Widgets. To some, this probably sounds about as interesting as when the Beatles finally came to iTunes — interesting, but late to the party. Still, once you’ve played around with them, iPad owners will realize what they were missing. You can populate your numerous homepages with a variety of widgets including Gmail and music. They update in real time and show more information than say, email on the iOS homescreen — whereas iOS will just show you the number of emails a user might have, the Gmail homepage widget shows subject headers and the first sentence or two of the actual message. Shuffling through say, emails, news items, and so forth is as easy as a swipe down, and tapping the item expands the widget to the full-screen app experience.

Notifications. I love my iPad, but I hate the notifications system, which is funny because I didn’t always feel that way. It was only when iOS introduced multitasking that I came to loathe it. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, blue pop-up windows appear smack in the middle of the screen, and the only way to go back to what you’re doing is to tap the window to make it disappear. Totally fine if this happens once in a while, but multitasking means this becomes more of a common occurrence. Sign into AOL Instant Messenger for instance, and prepare yourself for an incessant stream of notifications. Heaven help you if you’re trying to read a news story or ebook and chat with colleagues or friends at the same time. It’s a Herculean test of patience.

Honeycomb addresses notifications differently: you get a instant message or video chat call, a small notification pops up in the bottom right-hand corner. You can tap to expand and dive deeper into the notification, or you can ignore it completely. You’re not obligated to give it any attention until you’re ready. If there’s any downside to Honeycomb and tablets like the Xoom, it’s that we simply don’t know the toll these features may have on battery life. Motorola said recently we can expect 10 hours of continuous video, which is on par with the iPad, but with tons of multitasking and widgets potentially running in the background, the real-world figure could be much less.

Will Apple catch up? Of course, though on their own terms and in their own time, which is to say, many of these features will eventually make their way over but in a fashion that conforms to Apple’s ongoing mission of battery life and simplicity, sometimes over increased functionality.

Still, given what I’ve seen of Honeycomb and Motorola’s excellent tablet, Cupertino will have some serious catching up to do with their iPad 2.

Summary: The fusion of cutting edge hardware and radical user interface improvements proves iOS has catching up to do. Depending on who you asked at yesterday’s Android Honeycomb launch event in Mountain View, California, the latest upgrade to Google’s mobile OS was either a revelation or another iterative upgrade. Some of the attendees I spoke to…


Updated OCT 17, 2014 2:29a ET

Arizona Cardinals left cornerback Patrick Peterson is sometimes too good for his own good.

The Cardinals expect him to do more than a normal cornerback, and part of that means locking him into single coverage on an opponent's top receiver -- on an island, as it were. In this the age of global warming for offensive football, it does not always turn out well.

But if Peterson is so good that he occasionally can look bad, he would not have it any other way.

"I'm a man-to-man guy," said Peterson, who has been selected to the past three Pro Bowls. "I want to be in your face. I want the best receiver. That's how I was brought up and that's how I'm going to continue playing."

Peterson was beaten on two touchdown passes in the Cardinals' 30-20 victory over Washington on Sunday, a 64-yard slant-and-run by speedster DeSean Jackson and a 5-yard quick hitter to Pierre Garcon. Cardinals coach Bruce Arians acknowledged Monday that it was not one of Peterson's best games.

Peterson said he can do better.

"I do believe I am not playing to the best of my ability right now, but that's definitely going to change," Peterson said. "It's not a lack of focus, just being more dialed in ... each and every play, no matter who I am guarding."

Defensive coordinator Todd Bowles does not look at it that way. The fact that Peterson -- and to a lesser extent, right cornerback Antonio Cromartie -- can be used in solo coverage most of a game permits the Cardinals to do more of the blitz and stunt packages that Bowles prefers. If a cornerback is occasionally beat in coverage, it is a tradeoff the Cardinals can live with.

"Pat is his harshest critic. He would be the first one to tell you. I don't really think he is playing bad. He has had a play or two here and there that he needs to clean up, but he knows that and we know that, and we will get that corrected," Bowles said.

"Patrick is one of the reasons that we can do a lot of things we do inside, so for him to give up a pass or two doesn't mean he struggles. It just means we left him out there too long. We have to do a little more to help him."

By throwing away from Peterson, opponents are throwing into double coverage and/or throwing under pressure. Safety Rashad Johnson had two interceptions Sunday; hybrid defensive back Jerraud Powers had one. Peterson, who had 12 interceptions in the past three seasons, is looking for his first this year while playing solely on the left side for the first time in his career.

"If you have a man corner, that takes away half the field," Bowles said.

"You know where the ball may not be going. The few times you throw at him, if you get one or two, that's going to be warranted. But (Peterson) is going to get his also. That also allows you to help out in different areas where we are not as talented. He brings a lot to the table."

Peterson signed a five-year contract extension in July worth a guaranteed $48 million, with a max of $70 million, surpassing the deal signed by Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman. Peterson said, if anything, the big money alleviated any pressure he may have felt.

"Now, all I want to do is go out there, have fun, play football at a high level and do what I have to do to help my team win ballgames," Peterson said.

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The Cardinals (4-1) lead the NFC West entering a game at Oakland on Sunday, but they are not without defensive issues. They rank No. 25 in the NFL in yards allowed per game (384.8) and last in passing yards allowed (309.0). Part of that has to do with their emphasis on stuffing the run -- with Peterson and Cromartie in single coverage, they can commit another defender to the forward wall.

It also might have to do with the fact that the Cardinals have faced Peyton Manning, Philip Rivers and Kirk Cousins, three of the six most prolific quarterbacks in the league in terms of yards per game.

"It wasn't just Peyton," Bowles said. "We can't give up big plays, and we understand that. We can't let 5- and 10-yard plays go for 50 and 60 yards. The ball is not going over the top, it is going underneath. We have to tackle."

Jackson's 64-yard score came on that kind of play, when Jackson beat Peterson to the inside of the field and safety Tyrann Mathieu was out of position to help after the completion.

But as Peterson said, bring it on.

"Obviously he (Bowles) has a lot of trust in us," Peterson said. "Our defense is built around the corners, man-on-man on the outside, because we do so much blitzing and try to help guys in the interior of the defense and it pretty much leaves us out on an island by ourselves. It leaves us that much more open for exposure.

"You have to love this position, because one Sunday you can be great, next Sunday you can be horrible and the following Sunday after that you can be mediocre. That's the great thing about this job, about playing cornerback."

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Summary: Arizona Pro Bowl cornerback Patrick Peterson relishes the challengeof single coverage, even if that means occasional failure.


This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Haley Sweetland Edwards, TIME

Within a few hours of President Barack Obama’s call on Monday for regulators to ensure strict “net neutrality“—rules requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all Internet content equally—the Republican establishment’s hair caught on fire.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) called net neutrality the “Obamacare for the Internet“; House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said it was “a textbook example of the kind of Washington regulations that destroy innovation and entrepreneurship”; and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-Lousiana) said Obama’s attempt to “impose net neutrality regulations on the Internet” was a “radical effort” with “no justification.” To list just a few of the howling reactions.

But according to a poll released today by the Internet Freedom Business Alliance (IFBA), a pro-net neutrality association of businesses, Republicans and conservatives outside of Washington D.C., seem to think that the idea of net neutrality is actually a pretty good one.

Some 83% of voters who self-identified as “very conservative” were concerned about the possibility of ISPs having the power to “influence content” online. Only 17% reported being unconcerned. Similarly, 83% of self-identified conservatives thought that Congress should take action to ensure that cable companies do not “monopolize the Internet” or “reduce the inherent equality of the Internet” by charging some content companies for speedier access.

The poll did not ask participants about specific methods of regulation, like whether the Federal Communications Commission ought to reclassify consumer broadband Internet as a utility under “Title II”—as Obama has called for—or whether it should use “Section 706″ of the Telecommunications Act, another statute relating to broadband infrastructure.

The poll, explained Andrew Shore, the executive director of IFBA, was designed to “get to the heart” of net neutrality by asking voters whether they believed that the government should prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from charging Internet content companies for special access to Internet customers.

The poll also asked whether voters were concerned that big ISPs—like Comcast CMCSA , Verizon VZ , and AT&T T —could influence the government and elected officials in their favor; 72% of self-identified conservatives said yes.

Last year, Comcast—the nation’s biggest ISP by a long shot—spent more on lobbying than any other company in the U.S. except Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor that makes the B-2 bomber. Of the $16.4 million it has spent on lobbying and campaign contributions this year, large chunks have gone to the National Republican Congressional Committee ($104,000); the National Republican Senatorial Committee ($87,975); and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ($85,750), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Boehner, who was among the first to slam Obama’s call for net neutrality regulations yesterday, has received $107,775 from Comcast—nearly twice as much as any other other member of Congress. Boehner also holds stock in Comcast, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

But big Internet content companies which are in favor of net neutrality regulations, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Ebay, are hardly wallflowers in this debate. So far this year, Google spent $3.9 million in campaign donations and $13.7 million on lobbying.

(The Vox Populi poll surveyed 1,270 active voters on Oct. 26/27, with a margin of error of +/-2.8%.)

Summary: A poll released today by the Internet Freedom Business Alliance (IFBA), found that conservatives voters like the idea of net neutrality.


From the Charlottesville (Va.) Review.

In 1832, Mr. ALEXANDER RIVES, over the signature of "A Friend of Union and State Rights," published two communications in the Virginia (Charlottesville) Advocate. The letter of Mr. MADISON was called forth by these articles, and was addressed to the writer of them under his nom de plums. It bears no date, but a letter from Mr. RIVES, in reply to it, in our possession, is dated Jan. 7, 1833.

We publish verbatim from the MS.:

I have received the letter sighed "A Friend of Union and State Rights," inclosing two Essays under the same signature.

It is not usual to answer communications without the proper names to them. But the ability and the motives disclosed in the Essays induce me to say, in compliance with the wish expressed, that I the not consider the proceedings of Virginia in '98-99 as countenancing the doctrine that a State may at will secede from its Constitutional compact with the other States. A rightful secession requires the consent of the others, or an abuse of the compact absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.

In order to understand the reasoning on one side of the question, it is necessary to keep in view the precise state of the question and the positions and arguments on the other side. This is particularly necessary in questions arising under our novel aid compound system of government. Much error and confusion have grown out of a neglect of this precaution.

The case of the Alien and Sedition acts was a question between the Government and the Constituent Body, Virginia making an appeal to the latter against the assumption of power by the former.

The case of a claim in a State to secede from its union with the others, is a question among the States themselves as parties to a compact.

In the former case it was asserted against Virginia, that the States had no right to interpose Legislative declarations of opinion on a Constitutional point; nor a light to interpose at all against a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which was to be regarded as a tribunal from which then could be no appeal.

The object of Virginia was to vindicate Legislative declarations of opinion; to designate the several Constitutional modes of interposition by the States against abuses of power, and to establish the ultimate authority of the States as parties to and creditors of the Constitution, to interpose against the dicisions of the Judicial as well as the other branches of the Governments, the authority of the Judicial being in no sense ultimate, out of the purview and form of the Constitution.

Much use has been made of the term "respective'' in the 3d Resolution of Virginia, which asserts the right of the States, in cases of sufficient magnitude, to interpose ''for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, &c., appertaining to them;" the term "respective" being construed to mean a Constitutional right in each State, separately, to decide on and resist by force, encroachments within its limits. A foresight or apprehension of the misconstruction might easily have guarded against it. But, to say nothing of the distinction between ordinary and extreme cases, it is observable that, in this, as in other instances throughout the Resolutions, the plural number -- States -- is used in referring to them; that a concurrence and cooperation of all might well be contemplated in interpositions for effecting the objects within each; and that the language of the closing Resolutions corresponds with this view of the third. The course of reasoning in the Report on the Resolutions required the distinction between a State and the States.

It surely does not follow, from the fact of the States, or rather the people embodied in them, having as parties to the Constitutional compact no tribunal above them, that, in controverted meanings of the compact, a minority of the parties can rightfully decide against the majority; still less that a single party can decide against the rest; and as little that it can at will withdraw itself altogether from its compact with the rest.

The characteristic distinction between free Governments and Governments not free is, that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved, than every other has to deny the fact, and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single State has a right to secede at will from the rest, is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, and now here less so than where it is now most contended for.

A careless view of the subject might find an analogy between State secession and individual expatriation. But the distinction is obvious and essential. Even in the latter case, whether regarded as a right impliedly reserved in the original social compact, or as a reasonable indulgence, it is not exempt from certain conditions. It must be used without injustice or injury to the community from which the expatriating party separates himself. Assuredly he could not withdraw his portion of territory from the common domain. In the case of a State seceding from the Union its domain would be dismembered, and other consequences brought on not less obvious than pernicious.

I ought not to omit my regret, that in the remark on Mr. JEFFERSON and myself the names had not been transposed.

Having many reasons for marking this letter confidential, I must request that its publicity may not be permitted in any mode or through any channel. Among the reasons is the risk of misapprehensions or misconstructions, so common, without more attention and development than I could conveniently bestow on what is said. With respect.

Wishing to be assured that the letter has not miscarried, a single line acknowledging its receipt will be acceptable.

Some persons might conclude from the statement in the beginning of this letter, "A rightful secession requires the consent of the others," &c., that Mr. MADISON recognized in an extreme case the abstract right of recession now claimed by South Carolina. But by reference to his letter of March, 1833, to Mr. WEBSTER, it will be seen that he there states that "the right of secession for intolerable oppression is another name only for revolution."


FORTUNE — Following its $1.05 billion patent infringement victory last summer, Apple AAPL appealed the district court judge’s decision not to ban the sale of the Samsung devices that the jury determined had infringed multiple Apple patents.

Google GOOG and several other companies now want to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief to the appeals court in support of Samsung.

As Apple points out in its reply, filed Tuesday, Google is hardly a disinterested party:

The lead party on the brief, Google, Inc., admittedly has a direct interest in the outcome of this appeal. As the motion explains, Google is the developer of the Android operating system running on the Samsung smartphones that Apple seeks to enjoin in this case. That interest conflicts with the traditional role of an amicus as “an impartial friend of the court — not an adversary party in interest in the litigation.” United States v. Michigan, 940 F.2d 143, 165 (6th Cir. 1991) (emphasis in original)

Indeed, when amici have such a stake in the outcome of the case, courts have denied them leave to participate to prevent “an end run around court-imposed limitations on the length of parties’ briefs.”

See: Apple Opposition to Google et al. Amicus Curiae Brief in Samsung Case.

Summary: Apple to Google: If you've got something to say about Samsung, join the damned suit.


LONDON — The financial shockwaves from the Swiss franc’s staggering ascent, one of the most acute moves in decades by a major currency, have hit firms around the world, with at least two brokerages going out of business.

Though currency markets were a bit calmer Friday, with the euro up 2.5 percent at 1.0176 francs, the repercussions from the previous day’s move are being felt from New York to New Zealand via London.

At one point Thursday, the franc surged around 30 percent against the euro in the minutes after the Swiss National Bank, or SNB, said it was ditching an increasingly expensive policy to limit the export-sapping rise of the currency. Derek Halpenny, a currency strategist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, described the currency move as ‘‘unprecedented.’’ He’s not alone in thinking that.

The scale and speed of the move in what is one of the world’s most-traded currencies caught many financial firms unprepared. While holders of Swiss francs gained, those with sizeable holdings of euros or dollars against the franc would have suffered heavily.

While big banks can absorb big losses on markets, for some smaller firms, the volatility in the franc proved too much.

Alpari, the London-based brokerage firm that sponsors the shirt of English Premier League football club West Ham United, said it had to shut down its business.

In a statement, the firm said the majority of its clients sustained losses which exceeded their account equity. ‘‘Where a client cannot cover this loss, it is passed on to us,’’ it said. ‘‘This has forced Alpari (UK) Limited to confirm today that it has entered into insolvency.’’

The scale of anger within the firm is evident in a note that its market analyst, Craig Erlam, published Friday before news of the wind-down. Bemoaning the ‘‘idiotic actions of the SNB,’’ Erlam warned over the ‘‘longer term impact on the markets.’’

Alpari’s demise follows that of Global Brokers NZ., a small currency trading house in New Zealand.

Its director, David Johnson, announced on the website of affiliate Excel Markets, that it could no longer meet the regulatory minimum to continue business.

‘‘News of the impact of this event on companies and traders is just beginning to come to light,’’ he said. ‘‘As directors and shareholders we would like to offer our sincerest apologies for this devastating turn of events.’’

The two could be joined by FXCM, a New York-based currency broker, which has already warned that it ‘‘may be in breach of some regulatory capital requirements’’ after its clients experienced significant losses. Those losses, it said in a statement, ‘‘generated negative equity balances owed to FXCM of approximately $225 million.’’

Traders aren’t hopeful. FXCM shares are down a staggering 74 percent in pre-market trading following a 15 percent fall on Thursday.

Other firms, such as CMC Markets in London, said they can absorb the hit. Though its chief executive, Peter Cruddas, conceded that the firm sustained losses, he said the overall impact has not materially impacted the group. ‘‘It’s business as usual,’’ he insisted.

The decision by the Swiss central bank to call time on its efforts to prevent the euro from trading below 1.20 francs was a huge surprise. It came amid mounting speculation that the European Central Bank will next week back a big stimulus program that will put more euros in circulation which would further dilute their value.

As the outlook for the euro has darkened, the cost for the Swiss central bank of defending its policy by buying euros or selling francs has risen.

Though the timing of the Swiss decision proved a surprise, most foreign exchange experts thought the policy, called a peg, would have to be abandoned, just as previous such efforts had. In 1992, for example, the British pound suffered similarly dramatic losses as it crashed out of a fixed exchange-rate system that was then operating in Europe.

‘‘The history of currency pegs is that they are susceptible to changes in economic fundamentals that warrant a completely different level in the exchange rate,’’ said Neil MacKinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital.

The market impact was not limited to currencies. Switzerland’s stock market tanked almost 9 percent on Thursday and was down another 4 percent on Friday. The country’s government bond yields, meanwhile, went below zero.

The bond movement is due in part to the Swiss central bank’s decision on Thursday to also cut a key interest rate to -0.75 percent from -0.25 percent. The unusual move is meant to limit the strength of the franc by making returns on Swiss investments weaker.

Switzerland’s 10-year bond yield was -0.03 percent, meaning an investor would have to effectively pay to lend money to the Swiss government.


It’s no secret that Davos has a gender diversity problem. Of the some 2,500 participants in the World Economic Forum’s elite gathering this year, just 17 percent are women. Although organizers tried to increase the numbers by instituting a quota system for large companies — they must bring one woman for every four men — the number of women only increased by 2 percent since last year.

So who are these select women in attendance? Some, such as Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and Yahoo YHOO CEO Marissa Mayer, are household names, but we combed the participant list and found so many influential women who are less well known. You may not have heard of the six women listed below, but trust us: you will be impressed by their accomplishments.

Summary: Angela Merkel and Marissa Mayer may get most of the attention at Davos, but these women also are worth following.


The colorful and chaotic Kumbh Mela (Kumbh, for short) is possibly the largest religious gathering on earth. The Hindu pilgrimage, held in four Indian cities, each of which plays host once every twelve years, draws millions of devotees.

Now, thanks to Ramesh Raskar, an MIT Media Lab professor whose hometown, Nashik, is the venue for the upcoming Kumbh next fall, a group of tech-minded folks from Boston are pitching in to make the gathering safer.

Raskar is the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Camera Culture group and cofounder of EyeNetra Inc., a Somerville startup that makes cellphone-based optometry products. He is also the brains behind KumbhThon, an ongoing series of tech build-a-thons, the next of which begins in January in Nashik, to address Kumbh-specific problems.

Though dubbed “shortcut to Nirvana,” the joyous festival has the kind of problems you’d expect when tens of millions of people crowd a midsize city: children getting separated from their parents, disease outbreaks, even deadly stampedes.

So for the upcoming KumbhThon, the problem solvers are collaborating with stakeholders in Nashik, and at other institutes in India, to develop mobile technologies to keep Kumbh attendees safe.

“This is a bottom-up approach to innovation,” said Raskar.

Already the tech types have designed EpiMetrics, an app that allows medical staff to track the spread of viral diseases and intervene faster.

Another tool, MilApp, is designed to help police speedily reunite lost individuals with their loved ones.

The team also intends to pull data from cellphone towers so that they can tell authorities if a site is getting too crowded, and have them reroute pilgrims accordingly.

Pickpockets could have a field day at the Kumbh, so innovators have developed an app for cashless payments. Even an ascetic with no electronics on him can use the system by buying a kind of prepaid debit card, in the form of a wrist band with a barcode that storekeepers scan to receive payment.

The Kumbh offers an unparalleled opportunity to test products instantaneously, at scale, said Caitlin Dolkart, an MBA student at MIT who will attend the KumbhThon.

Its larger goal, added Raskar, is to create a new generation of social entrepreneurs.

The organizers say there could be takeaway lessons from Nashik for other emerging cities, large gatherings, and refugee camps the world over.

KumbhThon will take place in Nashik Jan. 24 to 31; Kumbh Mela comes to Nashik in fall 2015.

Summary: Thanks to Ramesh Raskar, aan MIT Media Lab professor whose hometown, Nashik, is the venue for the upcoming Kumbh next fall, a group of tech-minded folks from Boston are pitching in to make the gathering in India safer.


FORTUNE — Apple’s AAPL e-book antitrust trial began Monday and it quickly became clear that the case will revolve around Eddy Cue — Steve Jobs’ point man in the negotiations with publishers that the Department of Justice claims was an illegal conspiracy to raise the price of e-books.

The government’s opening statement — delivered before a packed courthouse and a spillover crowd on another floor — consisted primarily of a chronology of e-mail exchanges between Cue and the six book publishers, between Cue and Jobs, his boss, and between individual publishers talking about Cue. They constituted direct evidence, according to Lawrence Buterman, a DOJ co-counsel, that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a plot to violate the Sherman antitrust act.

Apple’s opening statement — once its lead attorney, Orin Snyder, got through asking the judge to “hit the delete” button on the opinion she offered at a pre-trial hearing that the government had already proved its case — tried to pull the rug out from under everything the DOJ had just presented. Cue, Snyder claims, was just trying to break into a crowded e-book market (one dominated by Amazon) using precisely the same approach he used when he got the company into the music market with iTunes and the applications market with the App Store. Those innovations poured billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, he said. “Apple should be applauded, not condemned.”

By the end of the morning session the only thing everyone in that courtroom knew for certain was the Cue’s testimony would be key. But we’re going to have to wait. He’s not scheduled to testify until June 13.

Summary: Apple's vice president for internet services emerges as the key witness for both sides.


She’s worked with Rupert Murdoch, Martha Stewart, Jane Fonda, and Michael Eisner. She helped put Patty Hearst in jail and Desperate Housewives on the air. Now she’s at Gilt Groupe, the hot luxury website, and she’s making herself over once again.

Some résumés are a lot more fun to read than others. Consider that of Hedy Lamarr, the sultry Austrian movie star of the 1930s. She was also something of a rocket scientist, who patented a radio guidance system later used by the U.S. military. Vladimir Nabokov made great contributions not only to literature but also to lepidoptery (the study of moths and butterflies). Duff McKagan rocked out as bassist of Guns N’ Roses; today, improbably, he runs a wealth-management firm.

Which brings us to Susan Lyne, the 61-year-old chairman of Gilt Groupe, the hot e-commerce site that sells designer everything from tutus to truffles. Lyne may not have made the kind of contribution to national security that, say, Lamarr did. But imagine a world without Desperate Housewives, or sophisticated movie magazines, or the ability to buy a Valentino bag at 70% off from the comfort of your office at exactly 12:01 p.m. every day. That’s the drab existence to which we would be condemned had not the peripatetic Lyne (rhymes with wine) helped bring those things to life. (Although the sales at Gilt Groupe, in truth, have not been good at all for my kids’ college funds.)

Lyne is a professional shape-shifter, and she has found great success by taking a distinctly unorthodox approach to her career. Today she is one of Internet 2.0’s top names, as comfortable on a panel with the likes of Sheryl Sandberg as she is talking iPad strategy with Gilt’s developers. She sits on the board of AOL AOL , where fellow director Jim Stengel calls her “the ideal board member.” But just a few years ago, when she became CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia MSO , she was a self-described Net novice. Before that she was a top programming exec at ABC; before that, a magazine editor; once, long ago, a happening hippie.

Yet there are a few common threads running through Susan Lyne’s career. First is that she has always been drawn to “where the heat is,” as she puts it. Rather than stick with what’s familiar, “I’ve taken a leap of faith on several occasions,” she says. “And in every case, on some level, I’ve become a beginner again.”

Another skein is that she’s written her own script. In an era when professional women were told to walk a narrow path if they wanted success, Lyne did the opposite. She chooses jobs because they interest her, not because they are the next rung; she finds time for her family; she relies on natural charm and a gracious manner over guns-blazing power plays. “Her grace and EQ [emotional intelligence quotient] are off the charts,” says Nick Beim, general partner at Matrix Partners and Gilt Groupe’s largest shareholder. She is also, say her fans, nearly unflappable. It’s a quality that has proved a welcome contrast to some of the larger-than-life personalities (Rupert? Martha? Jane Fonda? Hello?) with whom she has worked.

Lyne’s collaborative style may, in fact, be better suited to today’s uncertain business environment than the traditional command-and-control approach. She wears her leader mantle like a cashmere shawl rather than a suit of armor; her ego is there, but it’s one of the last things you notice about her. In other words, she doesn’t act much like a man. She has become an exceptional leader and mentor, particularly for women, who describe her as a sort of earth mama in Armani. Lyne has her finger on the pulse of popular culture, yes, but what she’s great at, it turns out, is getting creative types to do their very best work.

“The me of 40 years ago would definitely recognize me,” Lyne says with a wry smile over a glass of Pinot Grigio on the Upper East Side of New York City. I’m not so sure: She’s a perfect match for Madison Avenue — a cool, swanlike blonde with the kind of effortless style that most of us aspire to but never manage to pull off. She speaks slowly and quietly, with an apologetic throat-clearing when she’s about to say something tough. She is the perfect brand ambassador for Gilt Groupe.

But the Susan Lyne of the early 1970s wasn’t exactly thinking about new ways to move Pucci gowns and Calvin Klein suits; she devoted her days to overthrowing the rich rather than marketing to them. And she bought her clothes at Goodwill.

Lyne grew up in privilege — the eldest of five children (four of them daughters) of a prosperous, Boston-area, Irish Catholic family. Her father, Eugene Lyne, was a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur who taught her to be open to the world — but not as open as she turned out to be: In four years she managed to drop out of art school, George Washington University, and U.C. Berkeley. “I never really thought twice about leaving school,” she says today. “It was a moment when we felt we were going to change history.”

Even as a 19-year-old, Lyne had a talent for connecting with the highest-wattage people in town. In Berkeley her closest comrades were, in fact, comrades; she lived in a house run by The Red Family, Tom Hayden’s commune. She did silk-screen art and candlemaking projects at the Blue Fairyland preschool for kids, including Jane Fonda’s daughter. Even then, she was not your run-of-the-mill radical. “She was never a hippie-dippie type,” says Robert Scheer, the journalist and activist (and Lyne’s boyfriend at the time). “She was eager to explore the world; she was not a bitter rebel person. But she was nobody’s fool, ever.”

Lyne was also not much of a leader. “I was not that person with a megaphone,” she says. She realized she enjoyed being close to power, without having to wield it.

From hippie to haute couture: A Susan Lyne scrapbook

Lyne grew out of that scene and moved to San Francisco in 1975 in search of the next thing. She found it in magazines, landing a gig at City, Frances Ford Coppola’s Bay Area answer to Clay Felker’s New York. It was there she realized that she was good — really good — at helping other people do their own work better. “I could write a piece and it would be fine,” she says, “but I could assign a piece and it would be brilliant. I could make another person’s work that much better by the questions I asked.”

After City, Lyne jumped to New Times, the edgy biweekly run by Jonathan Larsen. There, working with her now ex-beau Scheer, she got one of the biggest scoops of the era: the first jailhouse interview with Bill and Emily Harris, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical cell that had kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974.

In the New Times interview, Emily Harris made reference to a monkey-face statuette that Hearst’s kidnapper — and, later, lover — Willie Wolfe had given her. The lawyer prosecuting Hearst, James Browning, read the piece, then reviewed the contents of her purse when she was arrested. There was the monkey face. Browning argued that if she had been forced to participate in an armed robbery, she wouldn’t be carrying around a gift from her kidnapper. Hearst went to jail for 22 months.

Even then, Lyne had a sixth sense for when a place had peaked. In 1978, she left New Times — which folded in 1979 — to become managing editor of the Village Voice. Rather than waiting for the top job, Lyne took another leap and signed on with IPC Films, the company founded by Jane Fonda (her Blue Fairyland buddy). Lyne’s job was to discover articles that could be turned into movies.

Yet it so happened that a movie was complicating her home life. In 1984, Lyne married George Crile III, a producer and reporter at 60 Minutes. Two years earlier, the documentary he produced with Mike Wallace, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, aired, charging that Gen. William Westmoreland had deliberately downplayed the strength of the North Vietnamese, deepening U.S. involvement in an unwinnable war. Westmoreland sued CBS and Crile for libel and $120 million in damages, and the trial began in 1984.

If the Patty Hearst case was the trial of its era, this was arguably the 1980s equivalent. Crile was castigated as both un-American and a sloppy reporter, but with the help of lawyer David Boies — who had never tried a libel case — he was vindicated in 1985, when Westmoreland abruptly settled for a statement that CBS had not intended to impugn his patriotism. Lyne, says Boies, who has remained a close friend, was a huge calming influence on Crile. “She played a critical role in keeping his spirits up,” Boies says. “And she was so cool in a crisis.”

Lyne chafed at the slow pace of movie development at Jane Fonda’s company, but she made a discovery there: The VCR was reinvigorating film as a cultural touchstone. “I was seeing a technological invention that changed the way people spent their time,” she says, “and therefore what they cared about.” Opening her deep Rolodex — remember, she tells employees, “you will meet these people over and over again” — she pitched Rupert Murdoch, who had owned the Voice, on creating a magazine about movies based loosely on a French publication. It would use top writers to explore the film business rather than simply sucking up to movie stars. When it launched in 1987, the magazine, Premiere, sold out its first run in two weeks.

It was at Premiere, says Lyne, that she learned that she was good at — and liked — being in charge. She stood out in journalism — a field known for blatant disregard of any kind of management — as the kind of boss who gave writers a lot of freedom and who remembered to ask them about their kids. “I absolutely loved working for her,” says Cyndi Stivers, who was Premiere’s deputy editor, and who worked for Lyne again at Martha Stewart. “She is decisive, she listens, she loves to brainstorm.” She also was unafraid to tackle icons like Robert Redford, whose Sundance Institute was the subject of one critical piece.

Leading as a woman, even in the late 1980s, presented challenges. Soon after starting Premiere, Lyne became pregnant with her second daughter. She hid it for five months (good thing boxy jackets were in!). Lyne went into labor on the way to a screening with colleagues. She switched taxis, had her daughter, Jane, within 10 minutes of arriving at the hospital, and went back to work three weeks later.

Lyne stayed at Premiere for eight years, then zigzagged again when Joe Roth, then the head of Walt Disney Studios, pitched her on developing first films, then made-for-TV movies. “In my 40 years in the business,” says Roth, now head of Revolution Studios, “I’ve rarely asked anyone [out of the business] to come in. But she had great business skills and great people skills and great taste.”

At first Lyne seemed a natural, greenlighting successful miniseries about Anne Frank and Judy Garland. She gained the attention of CEO Michael Eisner and, in 2002, was promoted to president of ABC Entertainment. Her mandate was simple — but close to impossible: get ABC out of the ratings basement and restore it to the glory it had when Eisner ran it back in the 1970s.

It was here that Lyne first tasted failure. At Disney DIS , even Mickey Mouse would have had to watch his back at the time. Eisner was under fire, president Bob Iger was trying to prove himself a worthy successor, and the network hadn’t had a hit in years. Lloyd Braun, ABC’s chairman and Lyne’s boss, butted heads with Iger over many things, including his and Lyne’s support of a wildly ambitious (and wildly expensive) drama called Lost.

Lyne was excited about new shows she’d aimed at women, whom she saw as an underserved market. There was Grey’s Anatomy, which she picked over a cop show. Then there was a quirky dramedy called Desperate Housewives, about the secret lives of the women who lived on a suburban street called Wisteria Lane. “She takes the script and plops it on my desk,” says Braun. “I look at it and go, ‘Good title, Susan.’ She goes, ‘Read this tonight — I love it!’ She knew.”

In April 2004, just a few weeks before ABC introduced its fall lineup, Braun got the hook. So, two weeks later, did Lyne, though Iger had said publicly that she was safe. Lyne was devastated: She had always been the one to quit; she had never even looked for a job before. “It was the first job,” she says, “where I felt like I wasn’t done yet.” It was a public hanging — and it came before her second full season had gone on the air. But although Lyne was furious — she ignored Eisner’s phone calls for a few weeks — she did ultimately let go of the grudge. “One thing I have learned over time,” she says, is not to “worry about all the small slights and political things. It’s such a huge time suck and such a girl thing.” Desperate Housewives won six Emmys in its first year, and its pilot was the highest-rated new show for ABC since 1996.

Getting fired, says Lyne, turned out to be a gift, because it led her to her first CEO job. Lyne initially agreed to join the board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), which hoped she could help extend the brand. But suddenly the brand itself was heading to jail, and the CEO, Sharon Patrick, was ousted. In part because of her measured style — a distinct contrast to the more voluble Stewart — Lyne emerged as a natural candidate to lead the company in a time of turmoil, taking over as CEO in November 2004. “She was such a great match for the brand,” says Wenda Millard, a fellow director and, after Lyne left, co-CEO. “And she engendered confidence and trust in people.”

At first, Lyne fit with Martha Stewart like a pinecone finial atop a Christmas lantern. “She instantly insinuated herself into the brand and understood what was needed to move it forward,” says Rick Boyko, a former director. Lyne made regular pilgrimages to “Camp Cupcake,” where Martha was a guest of the federal government in West Virginia, to play Scrabble and brainstorm. She diversified the company; she cut costs and boosted morale both inside MSLO and with advertisers, whom she helped convince that the drama was finally coming to an end. She even looked like Martha: New York called her Stewart’s “blonde doppelgänger,” then twisted the knife: “Whereas Martha is the image of a nurturer,” it read, “Lyne, by all accounts, is an actual nurturer.”

And then, suddenly, it was Lyne who needed nurturing. In late 2005, less than a year after she took over as CEO, her husband, George Crile, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Lyne continued to work full-time, speaking at analyst meetings, reviewing joint ventures, helping to choose fonts and fabric. But inside she suffered along with her husband, an adventurer who wrote the book Charlie Wilson’s War and interviewed al Qaeda members before 9/11. “I needed a thread to the future,” she says, “something that would connect me to life after George. Work was an antidote to the sadness. I can’t tell you it was the right decision, but it felt like salvation at the time.”

On May 15, 2006, Crile died. Lyne continued on as CEO, but with less comfort than before. Although Stewart was legally barred from running the company, she controlled the voting rights, and had an ally in her handpicked chairman, Charles Koppelman. Lyne clashed with Stewart and Koppelman about everything from Stewart’s pay to the appropriateness of Martha Stewart vitamins. Lyne made mistakes too. She launched a design magazine, Blueprint, but soon realized it was costing far too much. She shuttered it — then, the next morning, Stewart forced her to rehire every staffer.

In June 2008, Lyne stepped down. Although Stewart and Lyne insist they are good friends today, Stewart wouldn’t comment for this story. Lyne’s timing suggests that stockholders should leave whenever she does; since she left, MSLO’s stock has fallen almost 60%, to $3.51.

At the age of 58, Susan Lyne found herself as untethered as she had been back in Berkeley. She could have retreated to her Beaverkill, N.Y., country home, or traveled the world; she might have run Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo, for which she was hotly pursued.

Instead she decided to become an Internet guru, in September 2008 accepting the top job at Gilt. It was Matrix Partners’ Beim, an old friend of Lyne’s and Gilt Groupe’s largest investor, who first connected Lyne to Kevin Ryan, who led digital ad agency DoubleClick and, in 2007, founded Gilt. Sure, it was an Internet 2.0 company, but what it really wanted to be was an online lifestyle brand that offered something for every consumer in its demographic. Ryan knew that Lyne understood brands, and he wanted her Rolodex.

The Most Powerful Women in Business

Lyne started as CEO on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. In the ensuing recession she guided the company to explosive growth, reaching some $400 million in revenue and over 500 employees by the end of 2010. “She’s never above asking about what she doesn’t understand,” says Alexis Maybank, Gilt’s co-founder and chief marketing officer. “I watched her dive in and get her hands around every catch phrase, get the engineers to explain to her what it was that they did day in and day out.” The ordeal with her husband, Lyne says, made her a better manager — and person. “What I gained from that time,” she says, “was learning to give 100% to the person I’m talking to rather than obsessing about all the things I should be doing instead.”

In September 2010, Lyne moved up to chairman; Ryan says they are “partners,” but that his experience bringing companies to market means he should have the title when Gilt goes public. Lyne, for her part, waves off the title change, noting that many of the company’s channels and new ventures report to her.

In a September meeting to go over the iPad app prototype for Gilt’s gourmet food site, called Taste, Lyne comes across as self-assured and in charge — though she makes sure to warm up the room before they get down to business. “I made that raw tomato pasta recipe yesterday,” she says. “It. Was. Fabulous.” But what does she think of the app? She clears her throat, then speaks. “If we’re building an app that is going to be the best experience for making a recipe,” she says, “you want to let people pull in other recipes that they love.” Shouldn’t people keep their recipe files on Gilt Taste and use the site to buy ingredients? She offers to set up her own page of favorite recipes to get things started.

The room is silent. Then Ruth Reichl, the feisty former editor of Gourmet and Taste’s editorial adviser, speaks up. “That’s an incredible idea,” she says. “We hadn’t thought about it.” The meeting shifts — from a presentation to an enthusiastic interaction. Says Reichl, feigning annoyance: “She always asks the one smart question.”

With Gilt Groupe shooting for an IPO sometime next year, it’s unlikely that Lyne will move to a new post anytime soon. But if and when she does, what will it be? Lyne was, in fact, screenwriter Rod Lurie’s inspiration for the character of the first woman president in the TV show Commander-in-Chief. As he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd at the time, he wanted someone “of rather unimpeachable integrity, very kind, very calm.” Yes, but that was just a fantasy.

This article is from the October 17, 2011 issue of Fortune.

Summary: She's worked with Rupert Murdoch, Martha Stewart, Jane Fonda, and Michael Eisner. She helped put Patty Hearst in jail and Desperate Housewives on the air. Now she's at Gilt Groupe, the hot luxury website, and she's making herself over once again. Some résumés are a lot more fun to read than others. Consider that of…


FORTUNE — Everyone — from J.C. Penney JCP CEO Ron Johnson to Barnes & Noble BKS CEO William J. Lynch — wants to bridge the divide between online sales and in-store experience. They might use Saturdays Surf as an example. Saturdays is a surf shop without many surfboards in sight — they’re often stashed in the Manhattan shop’s basement. When a customer asks to see the full inventory, Co-owner Morgan Collett takes out an iPad; a surfboard called The Levitator appears on the screen, along with its price and the board’s specs. If the customer wants to hold the Levitator, Collet goes down to the basement and carries it upstairs. If the customer wants to buy the board, Collet taps the screen and swipes their credit card through a device attached to the iPad. The software Collett uses to display and sell his products on a tablet is called LightSpeed. It is that bridge.

LightSpeed treats retail inventory a bit like Amazon AMZN does. Or, better still, like an Apple AAPL store. By keeping the bulk of its product out of site — the surfboards, the boxed computers — a store manager can focus on creating a space that maximizes the customer experience. In an era when e-commerce allows instant purchases, the goal of a physical store is increasingly to get people to come in, hang out, and thenbuy something. Apple has its Genius Bar. Saturdays has an espresso bar.

About 10,000 stores already use LightSpeed, and the number is fast growing. In June, the company received a $30 million Series A investment from Accel Partners, which Ryan Sweeny — a partner at Accel — says will be used to expand into larger retail stores. But the power of the software extends beyond the confines of the store itself. As Steve Metzman, CEO of iBusiness Technologies, puts it, “We encourage retailers to load their device with all of their products and attend outside events. It enables people to communicate on an even playing field with the web.”

A shorter version of this story originally appeared in the August 13, 2012 issue of Fortune.

Summary: A new software platform from LightSpeed works between retailers and e-commerce.


Self-branding fatigue is hitting surfers. Who wants to be accountable all the time?

The great breakthrough of the social web is that you can be known. That tangle of relationships that ties you to your identity offline is increasingly approximated online, and web sites from Amazon AMZN to Zynga invite users to log on with social networking handles in order to interact with their real-life friends and colleagues. So it’s curious that the web site to capture the zeitgeist of our times is Chatroulette, an anonymous video site that requires no log-in. To play, you just go to the site, click a button, and talk to a stranger (or whatever else you want to do, just don’t tell me about it).

Chatroulette has the trappings of every web site fad. The site had 3.9 million visitors in February according to Comscore, quadrupling its traffic in a month. It has become a pop culture phenomenon with singer Ben Folds incorporating it into a live concert and Daily Show host Jon Stewart dedicating a segment to it. It has created at least one web celebrity, pianist Ben Merton who posts his improv videos using the site. It even has its own vocabulary word: players “next” each other when they’re ready to move on to a new conversation.

Meanwhile, site founder Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Moscow high schooler, is entertaining funding offers from investors across the valley and in New York and considering a move to the United States. And enterprising web marketers already offer their clients Chatroulette advertising strategies, despite the porn that pops up.

So why do people like it so much? In many ways, Chatroulette delivers on the original promise of the web. On the Internet, according to the 1993 New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog. One of the chief draws of the web has been the anonymity that allows for creative expression of any whim or fantasy, regardless of how well it matches with our perceived identity. This idea of an identity has always been both liberating and constraining. As long as humans have existed, we have sought anonymous outlets for expression of thoughts and feelings that can’t be revealed without compromising the identities we have constructed for ourselves. Consider Mad Men character Don Draper who is married to his wife Betty, but has a series of extramarital affairs that must be kept secret because they’d compromise his identity as a loving husband and father.

Social media is sucking the secrets out of our thoughts and actions. For the most part, this is a great thing. The social graph–that term coined by Mark Zuckerberg to describe the web of relationships that helps guarantee we are who we say we are–makes nearly everything better. Games are more fun because we know the players in real life. Books are more alluring because they come recommended by friends. And it’s more interesting to comment on Fred Wilson’s blog at Avc.com because you can identify the other people with whom you are conversing.

But we’ve taken identity to the extreme. We aren’t just constructing Facebook profiles anymore. We are building our personal brands, layering on photographs and compiling status updates that represent not the life we experience, but rather the life we want our audiences to believe we experience. And as more and more web services are launched and stitched together, allowing us to capture every image and identify our every location, we must complete an increasingly complex calculus to maintain these personal brands.

It’s no surprise that a backlash is emerging. My friend Guy Martin calls it Facebook fatigue. Last April when I interviewed Martin, 19, about how he used Facebook, he said he couldn’t even count how many times a day he went on it. This week he told me he has temporarily deactivated his account. “I just want to connect with people,” he told me over a game of Scrabble. “I can’t stand people knowing all these things about me but not really knowing me.”

Chatroulette is the ultimate expression of that backlash. With the service, we divorce ourselves from the social graph and all the constraints of identity that it entails. We are free to click through other human beings much like we’d click through web pages. Sure, this freedom allows for a lot of penises. I played for ten minutes this morning, clicking through 20 rounds of videos and I saw four of them. It’s also boring; I saw 11 young guys sitting at desks with bland facial expressions. And it’s weird. A boy no more than 13 tripped around a den wearing a woman’s dress and high heels. But that’s why it’s popular, and why we play: in the lives we curate and broadcast on the web, we work hard not to be perverse, boring or weird. But these human expressions can, in their banality, be profound.

Summary: Self-branding fatigue is hitting surfers. Who wants to be accountable all the time? The great breakthrough of the social web is that you can be known. That tangle of relationships that ties you to your identity offline is increasingly approximated online, and web sites from Amazon   to Zynga invite users to log on with…


Several dozen community activists are urging Mayor Martin J. Walsh to take advantage of the construction boom sweeping Boston by raising fees on developers to pay for affordable housing and job training initiatives.

At a meeting with city officials Wednesday, advocates representing a coalition of more than 30 housing and worker training organizations argued that soaring rents are driving low- and middle-income residents out of the city. They say higher fees will help Walsh fulfill one of his top priorities, increasing funding for affordable housing by $20 million a year and building 53,000 residential units by 2030.

And, with the Boston real estate market booming, they argue that developers can afford to pay more.

“In Boston, we’re blessed with a strong market, but that strong market is also creating challenges for residents in the form of high rents,” said Joseph Kriesberg, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations.

He and others are calling for a 40-plus percent hike in the so-called “linkage” fees that developers of most large commercial and institutional projects pay to city funds that underwrite affordable housing construction and job-training projects. The current fee is $8.34 for each square foot above 100,000 for affordable housing, and $1.67 for jobs programs.

A 350,000-square-foot commercial development would be assessed $2,085,000 for the housing fee, for example, after excluding the first 100,000 square feet; the payments would be made over seven years.

Advocates want to raise the housing fee to $12 per square foot and the jobs assessment to $2.40.

The fees were “put in place to make sure the benefits of growth were shared broadly,” Kriesberg said. “Now is the right time for an increase.”

The Walsh administration said it is open to raising those fees and has drafted a proposal. But city officials declined to release specifics, and in a statement the mayor struck a cautious tone.

“We’re exploring many options, and linkage is one of the resources we have in our toolbox. Any changes to linkage need to be carefully analyzed and balanced with its impact on commercial growth,” Walsh said.

Walsh has the authority to bump up fees every three years to account for inflation, but he would have to ask the Legislature for permission for increases of the magnitude sought by the advocates.

One possibility under consideration is lowering the cut-off size to 50,000 square feet, from 100,000.

Another is subjecting other types of developments to the fee, such as industrial parks.

The meeting Wednesday was hosted by John Barros, Boston’s chief of economic development.

The development community said a fee increase is unwarranted and would drive up the already steep cost of building in Boston, resulting in higher prices for tenants in those buildings.

Gregory Vasil, chief executive of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, said city officials should first document how higher fees would affect building costs.

“A lot of these [nonprofit] groups look at it as a negotiation, so they come up with a number and double it,” he said. “We want specifics that we can quantify.”

The nonprofits, hoping to ride the current wave of development, are pushing for quick action by Walsh. Adding to the urgency: Several workforce and job-training programs were gutted by recent state budget cuts, while government support of affordable housing initiatives has dwindled.

“The city is not getting the help from the federal and state governments for affordable housing that it used to,” said Thomas Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance. “That puts more pressure on pots of money the city does control, like linkage.”

The city has raised $6.4 million to $6.5 million a year in linkage payments for the past decade; since its inception in 1983 the program has extracted $155 million from developers and helped to create about 12,000 affordable housing units.

The debate comes as Walsh’s administration continues to overhaul the Boston Redevelopment Authority. An audit last summer found that he BRA had failed to collect millions of dollars it was owed, including linkage fees, because of shoddy administrative practices.

Several advocates who attended Wednesday’s meeting said they were impressed by the BRA’s reform efforts, such as developing a centralized system for tracking which developers owe linkage fees. Improved collections could increase linkage revenues, they said.

Advocates were also pleased the city’s jobs office will issue reports on how it spends the linkage money it receives, and will now alert nonprofits when funds become available.

But the fundamental problem, a lack of affordable housing, remains pressing.

“The city needs to be thinking big about building lots of new housing if we’re going to maintain economic diversity in the city,” Callahan said.

“Otherwise, we’ll become a city of the very rich and the very poor, we lose the owner-occupants who invest in their homes and their neighborhoods, and we lose a labor force that’s within an easy commute of their jobs. The problem is very severe.”

Summary: Dozens of nonprofits are urging Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh to boost funding for affordable housing and job training initiatives by substantially increasing fees on large commercial developments—and the city is listening.


Testing of self-driving cars on California roads has resulted in about a dozen minor accidents during the past six years, but humans were to blame for the accidents, Delphi Automotive and Google said.

No one was hurt in the accidents, according to both companies. The accidents came to light after the Associated Press examined state public records covering the companies and the cars, which must be filed in order to test the vehicles on public roads. The filings became mandatory in September.

The total number of accidents isn’t clear. Google acknowledged 11 accidents; Delphi admitted to 1.

Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving project, wrote in an Internet post that his company’s 11 accidents involved “light damage, no injuries.” Google has tested its vehicles over 1.7 million, nearly 1 million in self-driving mode.

“Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” he wrote.

Kristen Kinley, a spokeswoman for Delphi – a maker of automotive parts and components – said in an interview with Fortune that “these are engineering vehicles. You can’t get from A to B – to driverless cars – without a lot of testing. Driverless is still a long way off.”

As digital automotive safety technology improves, engineers are increasingly convinced that computers one day will take over for drivers, creating a transportation system that is far safer than today’s. Cars already can be equipped with sensors that can keep a car in its lane, brake to prevent a rear-end collision and detect pedestrians and bicyclists.

Yet few of the owners of the 250 million or so vehicles registered on U.S. roads have yet experienced even partially autonomous systems. The Boston Consulting Group, in a study released in January, forecasted “partially autonomous vehicles are likely to hit the roads in large numbers by 2017.”

The new technology is bound to worry and bewilder more than a few drivers, which is why Google, Delphi and the automakers are undertaking prolonged, extensive testing under real-world conditions to explore possible pitfalls and demonstrate technological effectiveness – with the goal of overcoming consumer skepticism.

“The potential for safety is enormous,” said Kinley. About 33,000 traffic fatalities were recorded in the U.S. in 2013. Delphi has been testing among its vehicles an Audi SQ5 in Silicon Valley. In October, while the car was stopped at an intersection, a second car jumped a median and collided with it, Kinley said. The car was in manual mode. No one was hurt.

In early April, Delphi’s autonomous Audi drove 3,400 miles from the west coast to New York, 99 percent of the distance without a driver controlling the car. The test was undertaken to demonstrate the vehicle’s capabilities.

“Many people don’t realize how far along some of these technologies are,” said Xavier Mosquet, leader of BCG’s automotive practice in North America, in the January report. BCG predicts that the technology will be “highly attractive to both carmakers and their customers.”

But first the public must be convinced that the computers, sensors and software that control these new machines will do a superior job of keeping it safe and sound.

Summary: The director of Google's self-driving project says, “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident."


05/16/2015 AT 10:50 AM EDT

's birthday, but she's the one doing the gift-giving.

The singer, who celebrated her 49th birthday on Saturday made a very exciting announcement for her fans.

featuring the inside of a recording studio, which included a voiceover from the star herself.

"I've promised you'd hear it from my lips and now you will," Jackson says in the video. "This year: new music, new world tour, a new movement. I've been listening, let's keep the conversation going."

Though it's not clear what the new movement is, the announcement is great news for fans, who have been waiting a long time – it's been seven years since the pop star's last studio album,

Summary: The singer gives fans the best present ever on her birthday