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Summary: Apple to sell 13 Beatles albums in its music store.


It’s getting harder for large companies to write the custom software they need to run and prosper in an era where they need to connect to customers (and potentially devices) worldwide. If you log into an online system to pay bills or select healthcare benefits, you’re likely using the new-age applications that these companies need to design, build, test, and deploy quickly and with minimal hassle.

This week in Santa Clara, Calif., a gaggle of tech vendors will gather to sing the praises of Cloud Foundry, a common set of tools called a “platform as a service” that aims to enable this modern type of development. Like the Linux operating system and OpenStack cloud framework before it, Cloud Foundry is an open-source project, meaning that the software and documentation is available to anyone as long as changes made are submitted back to the broader group.

“Most enterprises have developed systems that are difficult and expensive to deploy and operate, where cloud-native companies have invested in automation and architectures to make those problems go away,” says Andrew Clay Shafer, senior director of technology for Pivotal, a spin-out of EMC EMC and VMware VMW that offers a commercial version of Cloud Foundry.

“Cloud native” companies use modern tools to build software that is a set of tiny components or microservices that work together as opposed to the big, monolithic applications of yesteryear. These new companies are not bound by decades-old processes and gear.

“You can’t hope to continuously deliver software or operate microservices at scale if deployment is time-consuming and error-prone,” Shafer says. “Standardizing the platform and architectures which adhere to that cloud native platform contract makes deploying software a boring non-event so organizations can focus more resources on creating value and less on undifferentiated heavy lifting.”

All these Cloud Foundry vendors—Pivotal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard HPQ , ActiveState and others—pledge to support that core foundation but also add their own secret sauce to their branded version.

“We will cooperate on interoperability and compete on execution,” said Angel Diaz, IBM IBM Software Group’s vice president of cloud architecture and technology. In theory, that means that IBM’s Bluemix version of Cloud Foundry will work with Pivotal’s Pivotal CF, which will work with the HP Helion Development Platform. As always, the proof will be in the pudding.

The Cloud Foundry Summit will showcase many of these vendors but, more importantly, several actual users of Cloud Foundry, including Pivotal customers Allstate Insurance, Garmin, Humana, and Comcast. IBM customers Gamestop, Mindjet, and Cognitive Scale will also be in attendance.

In other words, there will be a lot of posturing in Santa Clara, with competing vendors talking up the generic platform while also stressing that their particular version is the best, prettiest, or most cost-effective.

IBM claims that Bluemix is attracting 8,000 new developers every week. IBM and HP both tout new support of Microsoft Windows-oriented, or .Net, applications although that support, along with new support for the popular Docker container technology, was added to the core Cloud Foundry code. Since many companies run a ton of Microsoft as well as Java software; if they want to meld the old with the new, this support in Cloud Foundry is important.

Also among the announcements: Mirantis will re-sell Pivotal CF and make sure it works well with the OpenStack framework, and Dell Digital Services will offer professional support for the Pivotal product.

As many players as there are stirring the Cloud Foundry pot, there are other contenders for this business. Red Hat RHT backs its own OpenShift for enterprise cloud development. And Salesforce CRM owns Heroku, a trail-blazer in this market, as well as its own Force.com. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services offer some of these capabilities as do a handful of smaller companies like Apprenda. Two weeks ago, Microsoft announced plans to support Cloud Foundry on Azure.

Use of these platforms may be gaining steam as more big companies realize they need to be faster and more nimble, but also want very tight control over when and if critical applications go into production, said Steve Hendrick, principal analyst at research firm ESG.

Summary: Pivotal, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and others are building Cloud Foundry together—and using it as a weapon against each other. Just another day at the open-source corral.


Hilton Kramer's excellent review (Dec. 28) of the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Commission on the Humanities report entitled ''The Humanities in American Life'' finds its force blunted by a tone of ''bland and fuzzy consensus'' and an ''intellectual squeamishness,'' which he judges to be largely political in origin. I am one of a growing minority of humanistic teacher-scholars who can sadly endorse the justice of Mr. Kramer's strictures.

If anything, he understates the case. He rightly characterizes as simply political certain research projects underwritten in recent years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and blames the report for being ''too polite'' to say so. But more than politeness may be involved - in fact a kind of censorship which warrants public exposure as perhaps the most ominous result of the widespread politicization of the academy.

Those few of us who have tried to address the crisis in the humanities with the verbal candor Mr. Kramer desiderates have faced greater obstacles than mere smears of ''elitism.'' In 1978 I published a letter in the quarterly Newsletter of our Modern Language Association, deploring that very abandonment of foreign language requirements that the Commission on the Humanities now underscores. But in order to do so I was forced by the editors to delete the phrase ''currently fashionable academic adulterations,'' applied to politically inspired courses like women's studies.

Admittedly, there are recent signs of thaw. In the current issue of The American Scholar, Roger Scruton has dared to list women's studies among ''humanities'' courses whose focus is political rather than educational. Nonetheless, it may be fairer to ascribe what Mr.Kramer aptly dubs the ''ameliorating rhetoric'' of ''The Humanities in American Life'' to something weightier - and uglier - than its compilers' misplaced (and questionable) politeness. EMERSON R. MARKS, Wellesley Hills, Mass.

Summary: To the Editor:    Hilton Kramer's excellent review (Dec. 28) of the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Commission on the Humanities report entitled ''The Humanities in American Life'' finds its force blunted by a tone of ''bland and fuzzy consensus'' and an ''intellectual squeamishness,'' which he judges to be largely political in origin. I am one of a growing minority of humanistic teacher-scholars who can sadly endorse the justice of Mr. Kramer's strictures.


CARTHAGE, Tunisia, Nov. 2— President Habib Bourguiba was told by aides here today that his ruling party and its ally, a trade union, had swept nearly every constituency in yesterday's elections for the National Assembly.

The news did not seem to surprise Mr. Bourguiba, 80 years old, who is President-for-life of this North African nation of seven million people.

Interior Minister Driss Guiga was scheduled to hold a news conference tonight to announce the final results, but the event was postponed until tomorrow morning without explanation.

The Bourguiba regime was accused by opposition leaders today of rigging the election and using strong-arm tactics to intimidate potential supporters of the three main opposition groups, the Movement of Popular Unity, the Movement of Social Democrats and the Communist Party. 5% of Vote Is One Goal

But in making the charges, which were denied by the ruling Destour Socialist Party, Ahmed Mestiri, the head of the Social Democrats, also expressed confidence that his group would obtain at least 5 percent of the vote, qualifying it to be legally recognized as a political party.

With the exception of the Communist Party, all political groups had been banned in Tunisia until last April, when the National Assembly election was announced by Mr. Bourguiba as part of an effort to liberalize the political system.

Government officials said today that even if opposition groups failed to obtain any seats in the assembly, the fact that 361 candidates of different parties took part in the election demonstrated the increasing liberalization of the system.

While officials of the ruling party were exultant today, their electoral allies, members of the Union of Tunisian Workers, were generally restrained. The Secretary General of the party, Tayeb Baccouche, had no official comment on the elections. He was opposed to the alliance with the ruling party, saying it would curb the independence of his group.

The reaction of residents of Carthage and of nearby Tunis was subdued, with most people feeling that the ruling party could not help but have won all the seats. Hashmi Ali, a student at the University of Tunis, put it this way: ''When you enjoy power for so long, why would you want to give it up?''


In its first hours in office, the Reagan Administration ordered Federal agencies to cut their expenditures for outside consultants by 5 percent. The order was in part a reaction to charges, many of them substantiated, of widespread waste and abuse in Federal consulting.

The basic difficulty is that the Federal consulting market contains incentives unlikely to induce good work. Most consulting firms are small, thinly capitalized, often evanescent businesses scrambling to survive in a buyer's market. In any one field, there are many consulting firms and few Federal agencies to hire them. In such a situation the firms inevitably tend to exaggerate their abilities and to promise more than they can deliver.

The agencies are poor at preventing projects from going awry. The contract officers are slow to react to draft products of projects, especially in ways that will allow timely adjustments in the consultants' work. The agencies also lack specific devices to abort projects where the consultant performs inadequately, events outrun the project, or the concept behind the project turns out to be misguided for reasons that are nobody's fault. In early 1973 I was part of a large team examining the environmental and economic impacts of second-home developments in rural areas. But by 1974 the oil embargo and the recession had nearly destroyed the market for distant leisure homes. In 1976 our study was published anyway, and almost no one noticed.

In addition, the Federal paperwork requirements compel consultants to submit frequent, lengthy, often meaningless progress and financial reports whose production and review will interfere with the real work of the projects. The paperwork also slows payments for completed work; at the moment several agencies owe me money for work I finished over three months ago - a tardiness I have rarely experienced with private clients. The slow payments sometimes force hard-pressed consultants to dun agencies for payment for past work on a project in order to finance doing the rest of it -an unhappy situation that will not encourage quality work.

The Federal agencies disconcert the consulting firms, too. After a project is awarded, an agency will sometimes alter its subject so drastically as to undo the competitive bidding that was supposed to justify the award in the first place. Recently I was part of a group that received an Environmental Protection Agency contract to analyze the siting of regionally needed but locally objectionable activities such as nuclear-waste and toxic-chemical disposal facilities. After an obscure struggle between two E.P.A. branches, the agency decided that our main assignment would be to do estimates of the future production of toxic chemicals - a very different task, for which another group might have been more qualified.

In another case a black-owned firm received a contract from the Energy Department under a program to encourage minority businesses to enter the energy field. The firm had no energy people on its staff, but its proposal stated that it would hire a former Interior Department subcabinet official to run the project and would engage several subcontractors, including myself. The Energy Deparment then rescinded the contract. The department, which was having a complex turf fight with the Interior Department over precisely the subjects of our study, said that the black firm lacked energy experience - which the department had known all along, to the point of agreeing to our arrangements to make up for the deficiency.

T HE consultants must compete ferociously. Perhaps 30 firms will write proposals to do a given project, and 29 will have to absorb the costs of writing the proposal. All the firms have to overbid on projects to cover proposals and other costs of getting business. They also have to provide for unpredictable periods when many employees have no paying work.

The turbulence of the firms' market affects their internal life. The prized employee is not the one who conceives, carries out or supervises publicly useful projects. Instead, it is the one who gets new business - work whose actual performance is often left to others. Another valued employee is the one who routinizes the work by selling what is essentially the same project to a whole series of agencies.

These deformations do not create good morale in the firms. Turnover is high. Staffers are hired and dismissed with great alacrity as projects come and go and specialties bloom and fade. Almost no one has time, inclination, or reason to acquire deep expertise in their fields. Job security is minimal; one is only as good as one's latest project. Few good livings can be made year after year in Federal consulting.

With a few exceptions such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Federal agencies rarely assign their best people to manage consulting contracts. The contract officers often know little about the subject matter of their projects. They tend to issue vague specifications that provoke vague or unfeasible proposals from consultants, who simply cannot tell what the contract officer has in mind.


HONG KONG, Feb. 16— The failure of London and Peking to resolve the long-term future of Hong Kong is producing increasing signs of nervousness in this normally optimistic British colony.

Sixteen years and five months from the end of January, Britain's lease on nine-tenths of Hong Kong, one of the most aggressive and successful trading centers in the world, expires and in theory it will be handed back to China. At present there are no signs of serious negotiations and when they do begin a major problem will be the fact that China has never recognised the legality of the lease.

Because China has a vested interest in Hong Kong maintaining its capitalist prosperity, few people believe Peking wants to jeopardize this by taking it back. China earns a third of its foreign exchange, essential for its modernization drive, from the colony, which also acts as a key entry port and center for expertise.

But an increasingly vocal minority of bankers, businessmen and academics here are arguing that unless the issue of the lease in resolved within the next three to five years, investment in Hong Kong could start drying up. Lease Expires in 1997

Behind this concern lies the fact that in legal terms Hong Kong is divided into two parts. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, the area on the mainland opposite the island, have been ceded to Britain in perpetuity but comprise only a tenth of the land area. The remainder, known as the New Territories, running up to the Chinese border, is held on a lease which runs out on June 30, 1997.

Without the New Territories, which contain most of Hong Kong's industries, power plants and reservoirs as well as housing for the workers who keep Hong Kong going, the colony would collapse. Banks expect loans for land and property development in the New Territories to be repaid in 10 to 15 years. But in a few years from now this will no longer be possible because of the lease deadline.

''It is going to be difficult to persuade any international lenders to lend against property as the date approaches,'' says Colin Stevens, chief executive of Barclays Bank in Hong Kong. ''Unless China recognizes this fact, confidence will start to be sapped.'' American Businessman Unworried

Not everyone, however, takes this pessimistic approach. The executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce, Ray Purl, says the question of Hong Kong's lease does not figure prominently in his members' concerns.

''They have a feeling that things will work out,'' he says. ''Either the Chinese will ignore it or some accomodation will be reached.''

The optimists can point to several factors to back up their faith in the colony's future. Peking has dropped a number of public and private hints aimed at reassuring investors. The most quoted is the advice of the Chinese deputy party chairman Deng Xiaoping, to the colony's governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, that investors should ''put their hearts at ease.''

In addition to its interest in earning foreign exchange from Hong Kong, Peking is also a major investor in the colony. Nobody knows exactly how many millions of dollars are involved but all its known investments in the New Territories are due to mature before 1997.

How is the issue of the lease likely to be resolved? When Sir Murray was asked this question late last year, he said simply: ''I don't know,'' adding that ''something will have to be done before 1997.''

In private conversations here Chinese officials say Peking is too involved with its modernization program for Hong Kong to be a top priority, especially as the present arrangements seem to suit both sides ''for the time being.''


AT the outset, I must state unequivocally that I believe in American education. I always have. As the product of a public school system and a parent who has sent four children to public schools in various states, I stand proudly in the tradition of

Disraeli, who said, ''Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.'' A little over 10 months ago, when President Reagan invited me to join his Cabinet as Secretary of Education, I discussed with him my commitment to serve in the interest of a better education system for our nation. The then President-elect assured me that while he fully intended to submit a bill to Congress which would remove the Department of Education from Cabinet-level status to some other structure, he just as fully considered the education of our citizens the best insurance our society has of preserving and protecting our democracy. In our discussion we decided without hesitation that whatever alternate structure we proposed would be responsive to the new federalism which this Administration embodies.

What is it then that we believe should be the definition of the Federal role in education? We must go back to the 10th Amendment of the Constitution to realize that in their wisdom our Founding Fathers delegated the responsibility for education to the states. Certainly since then there have been times when Federalintervention was necessary, but we must never forget that the Federal presence in education matters is not one of primary responsibility. Our Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments were enacted to protect each individual's right to an equality of opportunity which to us is one of our outstanding principles of government. I believe that although these amendments were written into the Constitution of the United States, in reality they should be enforced by all state and local entities of government as their own.

President Reagan stated the following in his proclamation of American Education Week: ''Historically, the responsibility for education of the young lies, first and foremost, with parents and then with the state and local education agencies whose primary role is helping parents with that task.'' Parents are the first teachers a child ever knows. Parents will teach their children for all their lives. Parents and the family unit will influence acchild far more deeply than any federally mandated program. Our belief is that parents, families, local communities and states need to be recognized as those who know best students and their education needs and then we need to allow them discretion to enact their programs for the education of their young.

The truly excellent programs that are most successful are those that have been developed and enacted not by the people in Washington, but those closest to the programs' location.

The President's decision to reduce Federal spending and intervention in education is not motivated by a desire to hurt schools or hamper effectiveness, but to free them from Federal domination and possible ultimate control. The best way to help education is to strengthen the economy that supports schools on the state and local levels. This is part and parcel of the President's economic-recovery program. All of our actions in the field of education have been steps taken to help schools become stronger.

One of the first steps this Administration has taken in order to restore American education to those who know it best was to sponsor and push for passage of the recent consolidation bill. Almost 30 Federal education programs have been placed into block grants to be administered at local and state levels. The diversity of our people is one of our greatest strengths. Their capacity for innovation, achievement and excellence will no longer be inhibited at the Federal level when parents and educators deal with America's students on a daily basis. Our block-grants approach to limited Federal assistance keeps the Feds out of school management.

Redefining the Federal role in education requires emphasizing certain facts which involve finances. First, the Department of Education does not administer all of the education-related programs now in existence. Second, the average percentage of funds supporting education programs is only 8 percent of the total budget. Third, the programs which serve a national concern to solve problems that are nationwide in scope will continue to exist and receive Federal funding. Fourth, any alternative to the existing Cabinet structure to be proposed will be based on philosophical beliefs based on this Administration's definitions of the Federal role as the primary consideration, and any economies, important as they are, will be secondary to our strong support of local and state control.

Our plans for reorganization envision a continued but limited Federal role that will maximize resources available for education while minimizing opportunities for Federal intrusion into this state and local matter.

Our national economy does play a major role in the way education programs and services reach their intended recipients. Inflation and high interest rates have drastically reduced the tax base upon which local and state governments depend to fund education. It is our belief that when President Reagan's economic-recovery program has stimulated and increased the buying power of our country, it will have a positive effect upon education as well. Our proposed budget reductions in education and in other areas of Federal spending are intended to strengthen schools by building a better tax base to support them.

The President favors tuition tax credits as a means of attaining more balance and strength from the private education sector. A relatively modest budget tax break for those who send their children to private schools will offer wider options for schooling and take some of the load off the public schools. We are proud of our public schools and feel that they will not be harmed by friendly competition from private schools. Despite the cries of doom I have heard recently about announcement of the formation of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, I have received letters, invitations and phone calls from people who are proud of their school systems. Concerned parents, educators, government officials and community leaders have pledged their commitment to re-examine, strengthen and support the school programs which will provide a quality education to all students. I have personally met with representatives from organized groups of parents, teachers, administrators, the business sector, private and public agencies and minority groups. At each meeting I have been impressed with their dedication and determination to improve the education opportunities available to students and their concern to raise the levels of expectations, standards and achievements of students. I am proud to be part of this movement at this time.

Among the nations of the world, the United States is respected for the opportunity for access to education that is an American birthright. We must now work to facilitate the Administration's program to strenghten local and state control by reducing Federal intrusions. President Reagan has a strong commitment to education. His record as Governor of California is proof of this. And his record as President of the United States will stand as additional proof that his programs will strenghten schools and colleges.


John E. Lawe has been re-elected to his third two-year term as president of the union that represents 33,000 of New York City's bus and subway workers, the union announced yesterday.

There was a four-way contest for the post, the top one in Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. Mr. Lawe received 11,782 votes; Arnold Cherry, running on the Cherry Team Slate, 5,439; Michael Warren, heading the United Reform Slate, 3,225, and Edward Kartsen, an independent candidate, 127, according to Kevin McGarvey, chairman of the union's elections committee. The election was by mail ballot.

Mr. Lawe, 59 years old, hailed the outcome as ''a vote of confidence'' in his ability to represent the transit workers in negotiations next spring with the Transit Authority. The current contract expires March 31.

It was Mr. Lawe who headed the local's bargaining team in the 1980 negotiations that resulted in an 11-day strike paralyzing the city's public transportation system. In his election campaign, he blamed opposition elements on the local's executive board for refusing to agree to stop the clock and permit further negotiations that might have led to a satisfactory agreement without a strike. A Different Approach

Mr. Lawe indicated earlier this year that he favored a different approach in the coming negotiations, one that would remove the likelihood of another strike. In an interview, he said that he would be willing to abandon the union's traditional policy of ''no contract, no work'' in exchange for the same right to arbitration that city employees have under the Office of Collective Bargaining.

With the start of negotiations only a few weeks away, Mr. Lawe, accompanied by Richard Ravitch, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has begun visiting transit facilities, discussing problems with workers.

Mr. Lawe's slate for top offices in the union was also elected, a spokesman for the union said. This included Charles Faulding, secretary-treasurer; Paul Caizzo, recording secretary; Gilbert Renschak, Sonny Hall, Martin Bellamy, Damaso Seda, Robert Fulton, Frank McCann and Joseph Quinn, vice presidents. Campaigned on Record

The spokesman, Joseph Kutch, said that it appeared that Mr. Lawe would also have well over a majority on the union's executive board. Mr. Lawe had campaigned on the basis of his record and experience as a negotiator, but his opponents were critical of the manner in which he has administered the union, charging that he was autocratic and had ignored democratic principles.

Mr. Warren, a bus-maintenance worker who was one of Mr. Lawe's challengers, said through his lawyer, David B. Lubash, that he did not consider the election a fair one. Through a series of legal actions earlier, Mr. Warren had unsuccessfully tried to block the election.

Last month, however, Judge Thomas F. Griesa of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered dissident elements in Local 100 to refrain from further legal action to prevent the vote. Lawyers for Mr. Lawe have filed a motion to dismiss the complaint of Mr. Warren about election procedures.

Mr. Lawe is a native of County Roscommon, Ireland. He began his career as a bus driver in 1950, and became president of the local in 1977. He lives with his wife and three children in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.


.8,2ANN ARBOR, Mich. - There is no reason to shed tears for Philip Agee, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer now residing in Hamburg, whose passport revocation was recently upheld, 7-2, by the United States Supreme Court. For Mr. Agee had announced and carried out a campaign to expose undercover C.I.A. agents stationed abroad and ''to drive them out of the countries where they are operating.'' The Court observed that the the record reveals that Mr. Agee's public identifications ''have been followed by episodes of violence against the persons and organizations identified.''

There is, however, reason to be concerned about the potential reach of the regulation under which the Secretary of State acted in the Agee case, a regulation that permits the Secretary to deny or to revoke a passport when he determines that a United States national's activities abroad ''are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.'' For example, does this regulation mean, to use an earlier standard applied by the State Department, that a passport may be denied or revoked for conduct ''likely to embarrass the United States''?

Concern about the outer limits of the regulation applied in the Agee case was hardly diminished by an exchange between the Solicitor General, Wade H. McCree Jr., and a member of the Supreme Court during the oral argument of the case.

Question: ''Supposing a person right now were to apply for a passport to go to Salvador, and when asked the purpose of his journey, to say, to denounce the United States policy in Salvador in supporting the junta. And the Secretary of State says, I just will not issue a passport for that purpose. Do you think he can consistently do that in the light of our previous cases?'' Mr. McCree: ''I would say, yes, he can. Because the President and the Secretary of State working under him are charged with conducting the foreign policy of the Nation, and the freedom of speech that we enjoy domestically may be different from that we can exercise in this context.''

There is broad language in Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's opinion for the Court in Agee indicating that the State Department has a good deal more discretion than even that suggested by Mr. McCree. ''To the extent the revocation of his passport operates to inhibit Agee,'' observed Chief Justice Burger, ''it is an inhibition of action, rather than of speech (and here he referred to the case of Zemel v. Rusk). Agee is as free to criticize the United States as he was when he held a passport.'' Reliance on Zemel v. Rusk seems misplaced. That case upheld a ban on travel to Cuba in the early 1960's. The State Department did not refuse to validate Mr. Zemel's passport for travel to Cuba because of anything he said or was likely to say but because all Americans had been prohibited from traveling to Cuba. It was in this context that the Zemel court, speaking through Chief Justice Earl Warren, observed that ''to the extent the Secretary's refusal to validate passports for Cuba acts as an inhibition ...it is an inhibition of action.''

To the extent that the Zemel case raised First Amendment issues, it did so only as a ''right of access'' or a ''right to gather information'' case. (Imposing an ''area restriction'' on a country does diminish the flow of information concerning that country.) But the First Amendment allows the Government a good deal more leeway to abridge the ability to gather information than to impose restrictions on what is said or may be said. It is one thing, for example, to declare a prison ''off-limits'' to the public and the press (this is an analogy to the Zemel case); it is quite another thing to deny only one particular reporter access to a prison because of something he said or is likely to say (this is an analogy to the Agee case).

The distinction drawn in the Agee case between ''action'' and ''speech'' is most troublesome. Surely the Court would not say today that if a public-school teacher were fired for saying things ''damaging'' to our foreign policy or if a person were denied admission to the bar for the same reason, that these governmental responses merely inhibited ''action,'' not ''speech.'' Nor would the Court be content to say that the ex-teacher or would-be lawyer remained ''as free to criticize the Government as before.''

I do not believe travel abroad, any more than public employment or the practice of a profession, may be conditioned upon the surrender of First Amendment rights that could not be abridged by direct Government action. Thus, I consider much of what the Agee Court said about ''the freedom to travel abroad'' both unfortunate and unnecessary. I say ''unnecessary'' because I have little doubt that Mr. Agee's ''speech'' could have been abridged by direct Government action (by a statute making it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover C.I.A. agents). The revocation of his passport indeed inhibited his ''speech,'' but - unlike the would-be traveler who merely criticizes our foreign policy on, say, El Salvador - his ''speech'' was not protected by the First Amendment. At least some of the things he had been saying directly interfered with intelligence operations abroad and jeopardized the safety of agents. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Yale Kamisar is professor of law at the University of Michigan.


Cenk Uygur can pinpoint the day he realized that Facebook FB video was going to rewrite his business model. It was April 6, the day his digital-video startup, TYT Network, uploaded a clip to the social network called “Teachers Sent to Jail FOR DECADES.”

The video didn’t strike Uygur as anything special—just a typical example of his network’s progressive news commentary. But by lunchtime, it had racked up 7 million Facebook “impressions,” or people who saw it in their Facebook News Feed. By the time he finished eating, it had added another million. He looked again when he arrived at his Los Angeles office: 9 million, total. And after he taped a show: 15 million. A day later, 18 million people had seen it. The day after that? Twenty-three million.

Looking over the stats, Uygur, who is TYT’s CEO, thought about all the videos his startup shared on the social network. “Oh, my God, these are all going to pop,” he thought. “It’s just a matter of time.” He had a second thought: “Our business is going to double.”

In recent months that kind of “oh, my God” moment has occurred for video creators around the world. News site BuzzFeed’s video views on Facebook grew 80-fold in a year, reaching more than 500 million in April. A series of eight videos by digital-media startup Mic garnered 33 million views in just two months. TYT has watched views grow by 10 times in four months. Dozens of other sites are reporting similar results—great news for them, and even better news for the social networking giant.

Seemingly overnight, video uploading and viewing have exploded on Facebook, where users now watch 4 billion video streams a day, quadruple what they watched a year ago. It’s happening because the social network’s engineers, quietly and with little fanfare, have retooled Facebook’s interface to make video easier than ever to watch and share. In February 2014, only a quarter of all videos posted to Facebook were uploaded directly to the network, while the rest came from YouTube GOOG or other video sites, according to analytics company Socialbakers. By a year later, the ratio had flipped: 70% of Facebook’s videos were uploaded directly.

These may sound like minor technical distinctions, but tiny changes make a huge difference when you’ve got 1.4 billion monthly active users. Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram already account for one out of every five minutes Americans spend on smartphones, and Facebook drives nearly a quarter of all web traffic. The company’s recent video improvements will likely push those numbers even higher. And while the surge will help the social network do even more to entertain bored millennials, there is also big money at stake. Facebook is, after all, in the advertising business. The new video-tech innovations not only encourage its users to spend more time on the site, but they also make it easier for marketers to reach those users.

Facebook has already proved that it’s a quick study in the ad world. Mobile advertising, a meaningless sliver of its business three years ago, made up 73% of its $3.3 billion in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2015. It’s the main reason Facebook’s total revenue has roughly tripled over that stretch, and it’s the driver of the network’s current $226 billion market cap and gaudy 40% operating profit margins. Video, especially mobile video, could blow up just as dramatically for Facebook, offering a gateway for advertisers to reach digital consumers in the format that most closely resembles television—just as the migration of advertising dollars from television to digital reaches a tipping point. Facebook has become “synonymous with mobile,” Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions, said at a recent investor conference. “I think that the next frontier is becoming synonymous with mobile video.”

To reach that frontier, Facebook is plowing resources into its video products at a rate that has executives buzzing at the television networks that are steadily losing ad spending to the Internet, and at the agencies that broker that spending. Above all, the push is raising questions for Google’s YouTube, the big kahuna of online video for the past decade, which for the first time faces a competitor that can match its reach.

Facebook’s mission-driven executives, famous for downplaying any profit motive, argue that the video push is not about money or getting a competitive edge—it’s about giving users what they want and connecting them to the content that matters. Still, “the TV money is coming,” says Richard Raddon, co-CEO of Zefr, a video data company. “Everyone is waking up to the fact that this is war.” Facebook doesn’t speak the language of conflict, but it suddenly looks very well-armed.

Everything is rad in “Awesome Town,” the conference room in which Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox holds his meetings. Adorned with gray mid-century furniture and neon-colored pillows, it is distinctly not an office, I’m told, because nobody at Facebook has an office. With capacity for 2,800 employees, Facebook’s new Frank Gehry–designed headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., has the world’s largest open-office floor plan. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg hold meetings in large glass snow globes bathed in sunlight, visible to passersby, if not approachable.

Facebook did not make Zuckerberg and Sandberg available for this story. Cox, on the other hand, is excited to talk about video. He’s excited to talk about any Facebook product, really, and about the company’s mission to “make the world more open and connected.” An Atlanta native who speaks with impassioned sincerity, Cox dropped out of a master’s program at Stanford to join Facebook in its very early days as a software engineer and became vice president of product in 2008. Any cynical questions from a business reporter, like “Is Facebook video a play for TV ad dollars?” or “Are you trying to beat YouTube?,” are quickly countered with the Mission: making the world more open and connected. There wasn’t some grand plan to become a video juggernaut, Cox says. It was just an experiment that actually, surprisingly, worked.

In late 2013 a handful of engineers on a “new ideas” team were studying why so few people clicked on videos in News Feed, the main stream of content that Facebook users scroll through. The engineers hypothesized that the video thumbnail images weren’t compelling and that even when they were, people got impatient waiting for videos to load.

Then one day the team remembered the Daily Prophet newspaper from the Harry Potter movies, where images on the printed page magically come to life as the characters read. Cox describes it as an “of course” moment: “News Feed clearly should be alive and move in your hands on smartphones.” So why not automatically play all the videos?

There were internal doubts about video autoplay—few things on the web are as annoying as an unwanted video stream with a loud, distracting soundtrack. Cox’s team assuaged these fears by turning the sound off by default: Facebook autoplays are silent until users choose otherwise. There were also technical challenges to making the preloaded videos work, particularly on phones and tablets and in regions with slow Internet connections. But Facebook threw more engineers at the problem and launched a prototype to a test audience in September 2013.

The result was, in Cox’s words, “completely rad,” and also “awesome.” Views steadily grew as Facebook rolled out the feature more widely. One eye-popping milestone: Last summer the biggest viral video phenomenon of 2014—the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge—happened mostly on Facebook, where 440 million viewers watched Ice Bucket videos a total of 10 billion times. (YouTube announced only 1 billion Ice Bucket views.) By January, Facebook was serving 3 billion video views a day. In April, Facebook hit 4 billion views per day, matching the latest estimates available for 10-year-old YouTube.

Of course, not all views are created equal, as digital-video executives will pointedly tell you. Facebook counts any video that plays for at least three seconds as a view, so its numbers include inattentive drive-bys and “nah, this is boring” changes of mind. YouTube switched its focus in 2012 from number of views to amount of viewing time, which the site says currently totals “hundreds of millions of hours” per day and is growing 50% year over year.

Facebook doesn’t release viewing-time metrics, but there’s anecdotal evidence that users have long attention spans. Complex Media, a culture-focused media company founded by fashion designer Marc Ecko, reports average completion rates of 78% for its Facebook videos, which last two to 10 minutes. But regardless of how long they’re watching, Facebook’s fast-growing audience is making marketers pay attention. “Everybody thinks of YouTube as the default holding place for video,” says Scott Symonds, managing director of media at digital ad agency AKQA. “Facebook is changing that and fast.”

YouTube’s CEO is onstage rattling off statistics, and the kids won’t stop screaming. The company’s Madison Square Garden ad-sales event is filled with Madison Avenue suits, save for a gaggle of teenage superfans in the front section who respond to everything Susan Wojcicki says with a spirited chorus of “Woooooo!”

The event is part of the annual NewFronts, designed to dazzle advertisers into spending some of the budgets earmarked for television commercials on digital video instead. Dazzle and scare them: In an ominous speech, YouTube star John Green, known for his Vlogbrothers channel, warns the suits that they risk losing relevance with an entire generation if they advertise only on TV. The teens dutifully Woooooo! The suits chew sriracha popcorn and nod.

YouTube has been making a version of this pitch for most of its existence. But the company’s 2015 NewFront contained a much subtler dig at a new competitor. Across two hours of PowerPoints and performances, the name Facebook was never mentioned, but the network’s presence was clear to anyone paying close attention. Comedian Grace Helbig highlighted the active engagement of her YouTube fans. “They’re not just passively seeing it as they scroll by,” she said. (You know, like on Facebook.) Green touted the power of YouTube’s fans while dissing the shrinking “eyeballs” business of easily ignored display ads. (You know, like on Facebook.)

Similar themes surfaced on YouTube parent company Google’s earnings call, just before the NewFronts. Google chief business officer Omid Kordestani noted that YouTube is a video destination, and therefore a YouTube session is a great time to show video ads to viewers: “Not when they are distracted by something else.” (You know, like on Facebook.)

Before this year, YouTube had little competition for videos from the Internet’s homegrown stars. When Steven Kydd launched Tastemade, his food-focused video network, in 2013, YouTube was essentially the only place to publish. “It was a one-horse town,” he says. Now distribution platforms from Facebook to Apple TV, Amazon Prime Instant Video, Snapchat, Vessel, Spotify, and Roku all want original video content. Some are offering creators like Tastemade a better deal than YouTube’s revenue-share model, in which Google gets a whopping 45% of the money their videos generate. “It’s a good time to be in the content business,” Kydd says with a wry smile.

In the one-horse-town days, when creators complained about the revenue split, YouTube had a one-word answer: “Scale.” As the only video platform with a billion-person audience, YouTube had the power to dictate terms. But lately, in a bid to outflank the new competition, YouTube has been rushing to lock its creators into long-term contracts, offering cash bonuses in exchange for exclusivity deals, according to the Wall Street Journal. (A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the report but said, “We’ve always invested in creators and their success.”)

Facebook hasn’t yet offered Internet stars a way to make money. So far, its sales pitch is simply, “Access our massive audience.” That pitch has already persuaded many traditional media brands to distribute more content via Facebook (including, full disclosure, Fortune, which recently launched a video interview series that Facebook hosted at its headquarters). That’s how Facebook persuaded Michelle Phan, famous for her makeup demonstrations and her 7.7 million YouTube subscribers, to post sneak-preview videos of her book to her Facebook page. It’s why Uygur’s TYT Network, which has more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, created a new show called Final Judgment specifically for Facebook. TYT isn’t making money on that content yet, but Uygur isn’t worried. “We believe in building the audience first, and the monetization comes after,” he says.

*May 18, 2012 to Dec. 31, 2014.

The audience growth Facebook offers is clear. Creators have already noticed that Facebook’s algorithm—the secret formula determining which content shows up in a person’s News Feed—seems to heavily favor video. For creators with more than a million Facebook fans, photo posts reach 14% of their audience on average, and text-only updates reach just 4%, according to one manager of content creators. But video posts? They reach 35%. In March, Facebook launched a tool that lets videomakers expand their audience even further: an embeddable player that allows Facebook videos to be published elsewhere on the web, just as YouTube’s player does.

If YouTube stars expand to Facebook or Vine or Vessel, it doesn’t mean they’ll abandon YouTube. It’s not either-or, but everywhere-all-the-time. Suzie Reider, head of advertising sales at YouTube, dismisses the idea of these platforms being a true competitive threat. “Users know [and] the creators know that YouTube’s heart and soul has been video from the beginning and will be video until the end,” she says.

The Youtube pitch party was one of 33 NewFront events in April, thrown by everyone from Hulu and Yahoo to the New York Times and Condé Nast. Facebook, conspicuously, did not throw one. Instead, one week prior to the NewFront noise, the company invited a few hundred executives from ad agencies and Fortune 500 brands to the cafeteria of its New York City office on Astor Place. There, Facebook executives Adam Berger and Keenan Pridmore unveiled Anthology, the company’s program to bring in more video ads.

Facebook doesn’t make content, but with Anthology, it acts as matchmaker between brands and companies that do—video creators like Vice Media, Tastemade, and the Onion. Let’s say you’re CEO of a sriracha popcorn business and you want to run video ads on Facebook. But because your company’s core business is making popcorn, you don’t have any videos to publish. With Anthology, you can pay to have someone like Vice make one for you. The cost starts at $2 million for a customized campaign and distribution, according to people in attendance at the Astor Place event.

Even though it was explicitly pitched to them, ad agencies—the ones who normally connect brands and “creatives”—worry that Anthology will give Facebook one more way to work around them. They’ve been getting used to that feeling. Facebook already likes to pitch directly to brands, dazzling them into spending more money on Facebook than their agencies might recommend. “Facebook is a bit of a frenemy to agencies,” says Tony Effik, vice president of media and connections for ad agency R/GA. But it’s a necessary frenemy; Effik praises Facebook’s ability to target very specific demographics with video ad campaigns. One agency executive grumbles about Facebook’s aggressiveness, while admitting, with a sigh, that its execution has been flawless. “I own Facebook stock,” he says. Everson, the Facebook marketing VP, says there’s no intention of eliminating the middlemen, telling Fortune, “We cannot do our jobs without our agency partners.”

Facebook is proceeding with caution in deploying its new generation of ads. Video autoplay was a magical surprising win, but advertisements are almost never a magical surprising win. Web audiences, particularly millennials and teens, are allergic to being sold to. As Shane Smith, CEO of Vice Media, likes to say, they have “the most sophisticated bullshit detectors in history.” Quality of content, not quantity of spending, is the key to reaching this audience, adds Steve Ellis, CEO of WhoSay, a platform that connects celebrities with brands. That’s why Facebook is asking media companies to make the ads—the better to bypass those detectors.

A slow start to the ad strategy hasn’t stopped analysts from obsessing over it. According to eMarketer, Facebook already owns a quarter of the mobile-ad market. Video is the next logical extension. On the company’s quarterly earnings call in April, no other topic drew more questions from analysts. “Mobile-video advertising is the Facebook story for 2015 to drive growth,” says Richard Greenfield, a media and tech analyst at BTIG.

There’s no question that the opportunity is massive. The average American now spends more time using a mobile device than watching television. Forrester expects digital advertising, a $57 billion business in 2014, to overtake TV’s $85 billion next year. Omnicom Media Group OMC , an ad agency holding company that oversees $55 billion in global ad spending, has advised some clients to move between 10% and 25% of their TV budgets to online video. Food giant Mondelez International MDLZ and insurer Allstate ALL (neither of them Omnicom clients) are among the big advertisers that have announced such moves.

Facebook doesn’t have this field to itself, of course. The very full bucket of TV ad dollars is too great a prize for any web platform to pass up. Messaging app Snapchat, a Facebook rival, is ramping up sales of video ads for its new Discover platform. Same goes for Twitter, which owns two hot video properties, Vine and Periscope. Spotify recently added video-streaming capabilities to its music-streaming app, partnering with just about every big name in digital-video content. Hulu, Yahoo YHOO , and Verizon-backed AOL AOL are doubling down on their video strategies. By this time next year, any one of them might have conjured up a 4-billion-view-a-day video product themselves.

Facebook has one huge advantage: data. No other media outlet knows the full name, hometown, marital status, exercise habits, political opinions, and favorite movies, musicians, cars, retailers, restaurants, airlines, and electronics brands of hundreds of millions of people. This enables the site to deliver the targeted audiences brands crave. Lexus, for example, created 1,000 versions of the same video ad to target 1,000 different types of customers on Facebook—so a “male Lexus enthusiast who appreciates technology” saw a different spot than “a female, who lives in Chicago, and enjoys travel.” Advertisers “are realizing that video doesn’t need to be this, like, super-blast thing. You can have all of the reach you care about in a targeted way,” says Fidji Simo, Facebook’s director of media products.

But Facebook’s biggest advantage over YouTube and other video providers may turn out to be boredom. “Video is watched when people are bored,” says Benjamin Ling, a venture capitalist who has worked at Google, YouTube, and Facebook. “Facebook is particularly good at curing boredom.” Where YouTube, owned by a search giant, makes it easy for people to find videos they’re looking for, Facebook can show people stuff they didn’t even know they wanted to see. And with almost a billion people logging on every day, the audience is there now. “We are already a destination for everything,” says Simo, “and video is a part of that.”

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine.

Summary: Facebook's video traffic has reached 4 billion daily views, making the social network YouTube's first real rival in online video—and an even tougher contender in the battle for digital ad dollars.


Stressed-out, overwhelmed and doing too much?

These complaints are common among busy, go-getter professionals. And it’s that stress that’s killing us, right? But what if we’re approaching it all wrong and it’s really all about our perception of stress and what we believe that’s holding us back?

That’s the take of some LinkedIn Influencers this week. Here’s what two of them had to say.

Kelly McGonigal, department of psychology, Stanford University

“For years… I told people that stress makes you sick; that it increases your risk of everything from the common cold to heart disease, depression, and addiction; and that it kills brain cells, damages your DNA, and makes you age faster,” wrote McGonigal in her post Forget What You’ve Heard About Stress… It’s Actually Good for You.

But what if it’s not actually that stress that’s damaging but how we respond to it? According to an extensive research study, “people who reported high levels of stress but who did not view their stress as harmful… had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than those who reported experiencing very little stress,” wrote McGonigal. “The researchers concluded that it wasn’t stress alone that was killing people. It was the combination of stress and the belief that stress is harmful.”

“The finding I had stumbled across — that stress is harmful only when you believe it is — offered me an opportunity to rethink what I was teaching,” she wrote. “I turned stress into the enemy, and I wasn’t alone. I was just one of many psychologists, doctors, and scientists crusading against stress. Like them, I believed that it was a dangerous epidemic that had to be stopped.”

Rather than managing stress as ‘toxic,’ perhaps the key is instead unlocking what we believe about stress and finding ways to embrace it and use it for good in our lives, she wrote. “The most exciting kind of scientific finding is one that challenges how you think about yourself and the world.”

LaRae Quy, former FBI special agent, founder and director, Mental Toughness Center

“Generalisations make our lives easier to manage because they help us manage the constant information that bombards our brain,” wrote Quy in her post How to Use Mental Toughness to Face Down Stereotypes..”

But negative stereotypes about ourselves and others can be dangerous, she wrote. Facing them down can make us mentally stronger overall and help us overcome them. Quy offers three ways to use mental toughness to do this. Among them:

“Recognise your brain has a built-in confirmation bias… Our brain stores information that is consistent with your own beliefs, values and self-image. This selective memory system helps keep the brain from getting overloaded with too much information,” Quy wrote. “Make a habit of educating yourself on what is new and different. Too often, we create a rule-of-thumb at one point in life and never take the time to re-evaluate its credibility.” Consider which generalisations have helped you make smarter choices and which rules of thumb are truly reliable into the future. The key, Quy wrote, is to be more aware of your own behaviour.

“Acknowledge your barriers and burdens. When you face down a negative stereotype about yourself, your situation, or others on your team, you are developing the mental toughness to acknowledge your burdens and barriers,” she wrote. “When we have to stretch our minds to come up with less predictable and mundane solutions, we stimulate creativity and mental flexibility.” In turn, we can then acknowledge the negative “without giving up hope of our future success”, Quy wrote.

“Mental toughness is learning how to control our mind, rather than letting our mind control us,” she wrote. “Awareness of how positive and negative generalisations affect our behaviour is essential for our success.”

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

Summary: It isnât the enemy you thought it was. Really. Plus, how to use mental toughness to combat stereotypes and internal beliefs.


Much as I enjoy P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels and the TV series “Downton Abbey,” I’ve never fancied having a valet. Imagine paying somebody to wake you, hand you the newspaper, remind you of the afternoon fox hunt, and help you put on your clothes. Creepy.

And then I met Alexa, the electronic servant packed into a sleek black cylinder called Echo. This $180 device from Amazon.com uses voice recognition and a broadband Internet connection to cater to my digital whims. After a few days, I’ve begun to see that Downton’s Lord Crawley is onto something. A chap can get used to this.

It points us toward a future in which we’ll control gadgets with our lips and not our fingers.

“Alexa, wake me at 7,” I mutter before tumbling into bed. Sure enough, she starts to warble right on time, falling silent the moment I tell her to stop. “Alexa, what’s on my calendar?” I ask, and a warm female voice rattles off my next four days’ worth of appointments. The words emerge all jumbled together, but no matter; I get the picture.

And then I get the news. “Alexa, flash briefing,” I say, and suddenly I’m listening to the latest headlines from NPR and the BBC. More trouble in Greece, it seems. Pity. Must call my broker.

Too bad Alexa can’t make breakfast. Actually, there are a lot of things she can’t do. But Amazon’s Echo is already excellent, and bound to get better as its software is upgraded.

It’s a bit confusing that the device is called Echo but answers to the name Alexa. Actually, Alexa is the brains of the system, and Echo is the first hardware product to offer it. Amazon hopes to add Alexa software to other devices.

But it started with Echo, which looks like a jet-black can for tennis balls. The lower two-thirds of the device is a speaker for playing Alexa’s voice, as well as news reports and music streamed from Amazon’s online music service. It’s a decent enough speaker at low volume, but sounds rough when you turn it way up.

Alexa gets her brains from the Internet. During setup, you connect the Echo to your Wi-Fi network. Then you set it up using an app that’s available for Android or Apple devices.

The Echo uses an array of seven microphones to pick up voices. I found it remarkably accurate, even when I spoke softly. A plastic ring around the rim of the device lights up when you say “Alexa,” the trigger world that tells Echo you’re about to give orders.

Saying “Alexa, what’s the weather like?” generates the latest forecast. “Alexa, play Henry Mancini” gives me a nostalgic playback of 1960s movie music. “Alexa, remind me to buy potatoes” adds it to my smartphone’s shopping list. It’s all hands-free, because Echo is constantly listening. It’s a potential privacy threat, but Amazon says that nothing you say is recorded unless it’s preceded by the word “Alexa.”

Amazon built in a few goofy gimmicks, similar to those you’ll find in Apple Inc.’s Siri speech-recognition software. For instance, if you say “Alexa, tell a joke,” prepare to be semi-amused. Alexa is lousy at answering requests for random facts; for instance, it doesn’t know the number of planets in the solar system. Throw the same question at Siri and at least the screen shows the relevant Wikipedia article. Google’s rival software, Google Now, did the best of all, speaking the names of all eight planets.

Still, Alexa’s bound to get smarter over time, and a lot more powerful. Major companies will make their services Alexa-compatible later this year. The online retailer StubHub will orally sell you concert tickets; financial software maker Intuit will let customers ask for their bank account balance; AOL will read its members the latest news headlines.

In addition, Amazon is investing $100 million in companies that are building Alexa-compatible products. The company wants Alexa embedded into practically anything electronic — TV sets, kitchen appliances, the bathroom medicine cabinet. You’ve heard of the Internet of Things, the effort to connect virtually every device to the network? Amazon wants us to control all these gadgets with our mouths.

So in a few years, I’ll walk into the house and say, “Alexa, turn on the Red Sox game, preheat the oven to 350, set the thermostat to 72, and transfer $500 from savings to checking.” And it will all happen, just like that.

I’ll still have to dress myself and pour my own coffee, but I think I can manage.

Summary: Amazon’s Echo points us toward a future in which we’ll control gadgets with our lips and not our fingers.


U.S. stocks erased losses and rose on Friday, with benchmark indexes extending gains into a fifth week, as investors detoured around a surprisingly disappointing jobs report.

The number of jobs created "was way under what they anticipated, but the unemployment rate countered that," Stephen Carl, head equity trader at the Williams Capital Group, said of the Labor Department's report, which had nonfarm payrolls adding just 142,000 jobs even as the jobless rate declined to 6.1 percent. Economists had expected payroll growth of 225,000 last month.

Read MoreDon't believe weak August jobs data: Economists

"This number is already out, and nobody knows what to make of it, so let's trade on the stuff we understand," said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

"Can we break through 2,000 on the S&P, will (10-year Treasury note) rates challenge 2.5 percent," said of technical and psychological levels viewed as resistance for traders.

The argument could also be made that the disappointing August jobs tally calmed concerns about the Federal Reserve removing stimulus sooner rather than later, with the Fed measuring the health of the jobs market as it tapers bond purchases and mulls the timing of interest-rate hikes.

Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren bolstered that view on Friday, saying in prepared remarks that the Fed should be patient in cutting stimulus given the "significant" slack in the labor market.

"With respect to the market, the rally in the S&P futures off a big miss still reflects the drug junkie attitude of anything that backs off the Fed is somehow good," emailed Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at the Lindsey Group.

"For those that are saying the Fed should rush to get out of bond buying, this might take away a little of that argument," said Kinahan.

"You know how the housing numbers are so confusing? So throw the jobs number in the same pile; initial claims, ADP, you usually get some signal, and there was nothing in any of those reports that would make you think we'd get a number this bad," said Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.

The one positive aspect of the monthly report is employment gains came in business services, health care and construction, areas were "careers are being created," as opposed to stepping-stone positions like "working at Kmart or tending bar," Kinahan said.

Summary: Stocks rose on Friday as investors bypassed a surprisingly disappointing jobs report.


"I think a lot of people were hoping that it will be a number that will prove it was weather that happened in Q1," he said. "If we don't get a good number, the month of April will let the air out."

In the past week, stocks told a tale of two markets—with the riskiest names hit hard and big blue chips finding buyers.

The small-cap Russell 2000 was down 3.6 percent, its worst week since June 2012. Hurt by selling in biotech and Internet shares, the Nasdaq was down 2.8 percent to 4,155. But the Dow was up 0.1 percent at 16,323, lifted by interest in old-line blue chips, like Exxon Mobil. The energy sector in fact was up 2.5 percent, its best weekly gain since October. The S&P 500 was down 0.5 percent at 1,857.

However, for the first quarter, the Dow is the worst performing of the major indexes, down 1.5 percent. Others are flattish, including the Nasdaq, down a half percent, and the S&P 500, the best performer, up 0.5 percent.

Read MoreGet ready for stocks to drop 35 percent: Pro

Momentum stocks were sharply lower on the week. Facebook, for instance, lost nearly 11 percent and Netflix lost 12 percent. The IBB, the iShares Nasdaq biotech ETF was down 6.7 percent for the week.

Stuart Freeman, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors, does not think the selloff in frothy names is a message about the broader market. "I don't think some of these hotter stocks pulling back is going to tell a tale for this market," he said. "We ended last year with a little bit of frenzied buying. We're working through that now."

Freeman said the market is letting off some steam, and while it could pullback, he does not expect a big correction. Freeman forecast the S&P 500 will end the year at 1,975 to 2,025, and he expects the best gains to come in the second half, after the market "chops" higher.

"We've seen a little speculation ... but we haven't seen topping type of speculation," he said. Of the selloff, "I think it's positive. That's what you want to see over time."

Read MoreS&P 500 to gain 10 to 15 percent: Pimco exec

Freeman said the market has a much different feel than it had at the beginning of the year.

"Utilities, health care and financials have been at the top of the market and industrials and discretionary have been at the bottom, but I do think we're seeing profit-taking in some of the better groups from last year. Some of the cyclical groups, and I also think investors, as we went through the winter and saw some of the data coming out of the cyclical economy. I think investors eased off some of the deeper cyclicals. As we come through the winter, I think we're going to see more data that looks better."

Freeman said the biggest risk for the market is if that economic data does not start to improve. "If we don't see more of pickup, even if it's not very strong ... the market could see more volatility because of that," he said.

Therefore, the always important jobs report will be very important in the coming week.

Drew Matus, senior U.S. economist at UBS, said the March jobs report should be better than February's. "I think everyone understands the weather held back a lot of industries. Since we didn't have the same kind of weather problems in March, we should get a little bit of payback," Matus said.

"I think more broadly speaking, we can tell from the claims that there hasn't been an acceleration in layoffs, and we know from everything else that the economy seems to be in an upward trajectory."

"We are at 225,000," said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. Maki expects to see the unemployment rate fall to 6.6 percent from 6.7 percent.

The first quarter closes out on Monday, and it has disappointed with a string of underwhelming data. Among the latest was this week's durable goods which showed a good headline reading but a disappointing 1.3 percent decline in core orders.

Besides the U.S. nonfarm payrolls, data in the coming week includes ISM manufacturing data and car sales, two important reads Tuesday on manufacturing but also the consumer. Maki said the ISM should show improvement over February—to 54, and should show the survey bottomed in January, evidence of a weather impact.

He is also watching for stronger car sales, with a snap back in March to an annualized selling rate of 15.9 million from 15.3 million in February.

JPMorgan economists this past week trimmed their growth forecast for the first quarter to 1.5 percent, and Matus expects to see 2 percent growth. For the second quarter, Matus sees a rebound to 3.7 percent.

"We'll definitely see the data suggest that weather was the big factor early in the year, and now it has gone away. Everything is still in place for a sustained recovery, a sustained Fed tapering and rate hikes in 2015, like the Fed was telling us," Matus said.

Another big event for markets is the European Central Bank rates meeting Thursday. While not expected to take action, the ECB has made it clear it could ease monetary policy if necessary.

Vassili Serebriakov, currency strategist at BNP Paribas, said he does not expect the ECB to act yet, but he is watching European inflation data Monday just in case it misses estimates.

"I think the forecast is 0.6. If we get lower than that, markets are going to start pricing in some possibility of ECB easing. I think it's still unlikely but clearly the odds are rising. I think if we do get a weaker print by no means it's a done deal. It's still going to be a very close call," he said.

Speculation about an ECB rate cut circulated in markets this past week, but it was speculation about Chinese stimulus that helped boost stocks.

Serebriakov said he expects dollar strength against the euro and yen. "It's a function of the payrolls report on Friday, which we expect to be quite positive with a print of 210,000, and the jobless rate falling to 6.6 percent," he said.

Read MoreTread carefully in Cuba's 'open' economy: Experts

"We heard the optimistic Fed last week, but we need data validation so it's really now up to the U.S. data to show us this was a weather-driven soft patch and nothing more than that. There's quite a bit of weight on those numbers. It's March, and it would probably take a couple of months to get a cleaner picture," he said.

Markets are also watching developments in Ukraine. Traders have been watching the situation closely and were especially alert to developments Friday, after reports of Russian troops on the border.

Following the market close Friday, the White House announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Barack Obama about the U.S. proposal for a diplomatic resolution. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks on Sunday about ways to defuse the crisis over Ukraine, with Kerry telling Moscow that progress depended on a Russian troop pullback from Ukraine's borders.

Summary: April could be the cruelest month for stocks so far this year if warmer weather doesn't reverse a trend of weaker economic data.


Blue Jeans has raised about $100 million in venture funding from investors like Battery Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

At the time of Primetime's launch last month, Blue Jeans said it had 20 trial customers using it, including Red Hat and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. TEDx will be using the technology for conferences this year, and Ramakrishnan said he soon hopes to engage in discussions with South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas megafestival held in March that includes music and film galas as well as a tech conference.

Sundance will feature Primetime for a few sessions. The first is on Monday for the premier of the documentary "Most Likely to Succeed," about a tech-focused high school in San Diego that's offering a new educational model.

Read MoreCisco sued Arista to protect innovation: CEO

As the movie is being shown at the festival, students at the San Diego school will get to watch it and then be brought into a panel discussion with the producer, writer and others involved in the film. Some high schools in Utah will also be part of the discussion remotely.

Primetime will then be used to broadcast to a select group of people a panel on Wednesday focused on how companies are producing films for modern audiences. And Blue Jeans will have a lounge on Main Street in Park City for events including a discussion on women in film.

"We're starting small and over time hoping that we can build it out," Ginsberg said. The hope is to "build this more into structure of our festival and utilize the technology for everything it can do."

Primetime will be priced based on size and duration, with a typical 1,000 person one-hour event costing about $3,500. However, for the next 60 to 90 days, Blue Jeans isn't charging users.

Read MoreProfiting in the cloud

"Even though we've run the product for months, until we have these first marquee events, it's hard to get someone to take that leap of faith and jump in," said Stu Aaron, the company's chief commercial officer.

While the technology has all sorts of potential applications in entertainment, sports and education, actually broadcasting films from Sundance to a wide audience may not be in the cards.

As much as the festival wants to bring its content to as many people as possible, the legal issues around streaming movies and the risks of potential piracy create some limitations.

"We're always interested in making sure filmmakers have control over the product," Ginsberg said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Ginsberg's name.

Summary: Sundance Film Festival is testing technology from Blue Jeans Network designed to bring interactive conferences to your living room.


A nearly doubling of the federal gas tax is needed to fix America's crumbling roads, bridges and transit systems, Rep. Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, said Tuesday.

Larsen is cosponsoring a bill that would raise the tax by 15 cents a gallon over three years.

"We've been doing a little bit of fiddling while Rome has been burning, meaning our infrastructure in this country is falling part. We need to have a long-term plan to finance its rebuilding and the maintenance of it, as well," he said in an interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell."

The federal gas tax, which funds the Federal Highway Trust Fund, has remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. The fund provides money for infrastructure work and is set to expire on July 31.

Read More Spend on roads, bridges and rail: Former PA governor

Larsen pointed out that if the tax grew by inflation since the last increase, it would be at 30 cents right now. The proposed increase would raise the tax to 33 cents per gallon, which would mean about $19 billion more annually over the life of the increase for infrastructure repair, he said.

He believes the improvements would help ensure America's economic competitiveness.

"If we are not helping our own economy move the freight and goods to the markets, into the ports around this country, we won't be taking advantage of trade policy."

Talks of a gas tax hike began heating up last year, when gasoline prices began to fall. Americans are now paying a national average of $2.77 a gallon, according to AAA.

Read MoreCalifornia gas spike won't go national: Analyst

Larsen said that despite the higher tax, there is a payoff for drivers.

"We have to appreciate what the taxpayer's going through but what they are also going through right now is, on average, spending $515 a year per driver just for maintenance for their cars because of the poor infrastructure quality that we have in this country."

America has four million miles of highway, and 32 percent are in poor or mediocre condition, according to a 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers report.

—CNBC's Trent Gillies contributed to this report.

Summary: A nearly doubling of the federal gas tax is needed to fix America's crumbling infrastructure, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Washington, said Tuesday.


Iron ore prices fell to $44 a ton in July, the lowest level since the financial crisis, but have since risen to $55.80. Rio did not disclose its views on iron ore prices for the next 15 years.

More from the Financial Times:

Collapse in premiums hits aluminium trade Antofagasta loses 2.1% amid mining woes Copper falls to 6-year low

Rio said its forecast was based on a "granular" bottom-up analysis of demand in China, down to the number of bridges and apartment buildings that are likely to be built and expected growth in car ownership. By 2030, nearly 25 per cent of the current urban residential building stock will be demolished and rebuilt in China, the company said.

It also takes into consideration the substitution of steel for other metals such as aluminium, and the use of scrap steel from older buildings, Mr Harding said.

Growth in Southeast Asian countries and India over the next 15 years will provide markets for China's exports, he added.

Between the early 1950s and 1973, Japanese steel production grew at more than 15 per cent a year, before peaking at 119 million tons in 1973, according to David Humphreys, the author of The Remaking of the Mining Industry. US steel output peaked at 137 million tons in 1974.

Read MoreBHP Billiton CEO bullish on China as profit tumbles 86%

China produced a record 822.7 million tons last year, about half of the world's output. A glut of steel production in China and a slowing economy have led to much of the metal making being exported, depressing global markets and stoking trade tensions.

However, Rio said it expects China's steel exports to be maintained at current levels.

Amid falling prices, Rio is targeting further cost-cutting and improved productivity. It said its cash costs for iron ore were $16.20 a ton in the first half of 2015, compared with $20.40 a ton for the same period last year.

The company is sticking with its plans to produce 335 million tons of iron ore next year and 350 million tons in 2017.

Summary: Rio Tinto says China's steel production will grow modestly until 2030 but demand will increase in other emerging markets in Southeast Asia and India, the Financial Times reports.


Hagerty recalled one of his first experiences with the island's cars on a trip their 15 years ago: "When I went, I jumped in a 1956 Cadillac, and it looked really good. The guy turned the key and it had a Peugeot diesel engine."

Hagerty likened it to a "Galapagos Island" of cars. "Because they've been cut off for so long, they've morphed into their own species. It's not a Cadillac. It's something else."

Read MoreAre muscle cars a good investment?

To use an example of how that affects valuation, Linden said a quintessential American car like a 1957 Chevy Bel Air four-door sedan, in perfect condition with original parts, could sell for as much as $50,000. The same model in Cuba, with a large dollop of Bondo body filler and substitute parts, would probably sell for only $5,000.

Additionally, the sweet spot of car collecting has moved from the 1950s to the 1960s. "What's hot right now are the American muscle cars of the late '60s and '70s," Magers said. Models such as Ford Mustangs from 1965 to 1973, Dodge Challengers, Chargers and Daytonas are hot, plus the Shelby Plymouth Superbird.

Summary: Car collectors will not be descending on Cuba to buy up the thousands of antique American cars still on the road in the Caribbean nation.


Jim Cramer is concerned about the amount of mistakes that the market is making lately. A lot of things have gone wrong, in both before- and after-market hours.

Frankly, he is completely stunned at the amount of moronic activity happening, and he wants to remind investors to trust their instincts.

Take Chipotle, for example. On Monday, it reported an unheard-of 19.8 percent comparable sales number, versus the already high expectation of 17.2. Analysts wanted $3.83 in earnings; Chipotle one-upped them with $4.15.

Yet the stock has tumbled from $653 to $607, because the company gave cautious guidance. That is the biggest decline in 17 months.

"I think the company would have been nuts not to give cautious guidance. Who can possibly maintain that space?"

Cramer thinks this stock has room to grow. Even after it raised prices for customers last quarter, Chipotle still posted monumental earnings. Yet, it still has gone down on Wednesday.

Summary: Jim Cramer tries to make sense of the moronic market activity, and suggests investors buy, buy, buy these stocks instead.


Top executives from the biggest U.S. banks, concerned about anti-Wall Street rhetoric that is already bubbling up on the 2016 campaign trail, are working to push back against the prevailing narrative that "banks are bad," The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Senior executives from seven of the biggest U.S. banks gathered at, or dialed into, a lunchtime meeting held in the Bank of America Tower in New York on March 31, the Journal reported.

The banks discussed the upcoming election cycle and how they can counteract what they view as false and damaging statements about large banks, the paper said.

Read MoreBank of America, JPMorgan to kill 'zombie debt'

The discussion centered on finding ways to highlight the positive role banks play in the economy and the changes they have made since the financial crisis, said the report, which also cited emails reviewed by the paper.

The banks that took part were JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York Mellon and State Street.

None of the banks responded immediately to a request for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

Summary: Top U.S. bank execs are working to push back against "banks are bad" election rhetoric, The Wall Street Journal reports.


09/24/2015 AT 05:30 PM EDT

Therapy is in session – and not a moment too soon.

There are plenty of hugs, tears and yelling in the exclusive trailer for season 6 of VH1's

Among the stars showcased in the explosive trailer are former model

and her fiancé, Dr. Robert "Rocky" Gerner;

on-again, off-again couple Joe Budden and Kaylin Garcia; and Creed frontman

Dickinson confronts Budden about domestic violence allegations against him, and she promises he'll be sorry if he lays a finger on Garcia.

"Don't touch me, don't touch me, don't touch me," Dickinson says as Budden walks toward her, menacingly.

At another moment, Stapp discusses coming down from a high only to discover his wife filed for divorce.

"I'm a suicide bomber. I've got a vest on, wrapped with explosives, and I'm constantly just ticking," says Stapp, who has

The series follows five couples as they enter three weeks of intensive therapy.

season 6 begins Oct. 7 at 10 p.m. ET on VH1.

Summary: Get ready for the season 6 debut of the reality series


However, while a sharp rise interest rates would "certainly" lead to a decline in stocks, the market has had declines "forever," Bogle said.

"I've been through, I think, four 50 percent declines, at least three, and we get over them and march on," he noted. "It's a good idea to not pay too much attention to the stock market and think about the long-term productivity of business."

Read MoreWhy Dow Theory isn't a red flag

Therefore, Bogle advocates investing in the overall stock market—and not individual names—as well as putting some money in short-term or intermediate-term bonds.

He called stocks "fairly reasonably valued" if you take their earnings yield into account.

"You've got to keep investing in stocks and bonds, because I don't think the other alternatives—commodities, for example, or gold—have any long-term return prospects at all," he said.

"Go into the casino, which is what Wall Street is today, bet on the entire stock market. And then get out of the casino and never show yourself there again."

Read MoreBull market about to hit some turbulence: Trader

Summary: It's a hard time to invest, index mutual fund pioneer Jack Bogle said. Here's his approach to the markets.


Twitter's declining user engagement has triggered concerns among investors, but former Apple CEO John Sculley isn't writing the micro blogging website off yet.

"Look what happened with Facebook over the past three years: they had no position in mobile now they've got half their profits from mobile. These social network businesses can change very, very quickly, so I wouldn't count Twitter out at this point," Sculley, now a high-tech entrepreneur, told CNBC.

Twitter's third-quarter user growth slowed and its loss widened, contributing to an 11 percent decline in after-hours trading on Monday.

Read MoreTwitter shares fall over 10% on earnings report

The site reported a 7 percent on-year fall in timeline views per user – a key of measure of engagement – in the three months to September.

While, the company more than doubled its revenue, its net loss widened to $175.5 million from nearly $65 million during the same quarter last year.

Read MoreTwitter earnings: Investors look for profit in ad products

"[Twitter's] business model is one that's still evolving," said Sculley. "They are trying to put a 'buy' button in and if they are successful with that, it could open up a whole new opportunity."

Twitter is experimenting with a "buy" button in some tweets that allows a mobile user to buy directly from a tweet. Facebook has also been testing out a similar service on its websites that will let consumers purchase products that are advertised on its network.

Next big thing in tech

The next big trend in the tech world is consumers will be firmly in the driving seat, Sculley said.

Summary: Twitter's declining user engagement has triggered concerns among investors, but former Apple CEO isn't writing the micro blogging website off yet.


Apple has recently taken a tumble, falling more than 5 percent this week. But according to one technician, the drop provides a golden chance for investors to snatch up the tech giant's shares.

Evercore ISI's Rich Ross said although the stock has broken a key level in falling below its 200-day moving average, it could be a "potential false break … which gets us going in the other direction."

Apple has dropped about 12 percent since reporting second-quarter earnings in late July.

Ross said the stock has fallen around support levels of $115, and if it continues to fall significantly, the next level to watch for will be $106.

He noted that Apple has yet to fall back to early 2015 levels before a jump on earnings in January, when the stock gained more than 5 percent after the report's release. The stock is up more than 3 percent year to date, and hit an all-time high of $134 in April.

"The break below the 200-day is not great, however, ultimately I think this is going to create a nice summer buying opportunity and the stock should rise in the fall," Ross said Tuesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

Read More Traders bet on another plunge for Apple

Ross thinks Apple can pare losses and return to a price target of $152, a 33 percent rise from its Tuesday close of $114.

"Apple remains structurally sounds and in a long-term uptrend," Ross said. "Ultimately, this is a stock which can easily regain momentum lost during six months of sideways trading."

Although Apple beat earnings expectations in July, the stock price fell on concern over the company's ability to keep up growth in products and iPhone sales.

However, the majority of analysts remain bullish. About 73 percent have a "buy" rating on Apple, with an average price target of $146.

Summary: Apple’s shares have recently taken a tumble, but one technician says the drop is a "summer buying opportunity."


09/30/2015 AT 02:15 PM EDT

From Jesse and Danny to Jimmy and Ronnie, the pairing of

by any other names is just as sweet.

PEOPLE has learned exclusively that Saget, 59, has signed on to reprise the cameo he made in the series pilot of Stamos' new sitcom

And, according to a Fox description, the man who played Danny Tanner won't be the voice of reason this time. Instead, he's set to play Ronnie, the longtime best bud Stamos' Jimmy, who coaxes him into reliving their wild weekend nights out amid the new grandfather's transition to become a family man.

will be making a cameo on an upcoming episode.

It seems the trio of actors, who are all set to make appearances on Netflix's 2016 spin-off

, just can't seem to to get enough of reliving the Tanner household days.

that "the show is about a

kind of guy. ... He's a bachelor who thinks he's got it all, but there is something missing. He finds out he has a son and it takes him aback, but that's not all. It turns out that he's got a daughter, and that makes him a grandfather."

airs Tuesdays (8 p.m. ET) on Fox.

Summary: Saget will expand a cameo role from the Fox comedy's pilot


Shoppers have particular flexibility when it comes to waiting for discounts on nonessential items, including apparel. As a result, Beemer predicts revenues will be "all over the board" for clothing retailers, depending on who has the most aggressive promotions.

Shoe sales, however, should perform well, as no parent will send their child to school in ill-fitting shoes for three months, he said. Along those lines, supplies required by the teacher or school will also offer less wiggle room for consumers.

Read MoreShipping costs may put retail on the naughty list

There are several external factors that could provide a boon to back-to-school spending. A recent report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas found a 5 percent increase in the number of teens ages 16 to 19 who were employed as of May.

And among the adult set, who fuel the majority of these purchases, consumer confidence has also improved.

"[Back-to-school] could be a proxy for how well mom and dad feel," Beder said.

The bull case, he added, would be that parents haven't spent a lot of money on their kids over the past few years; so now that they're feeling more confident in the economy, they may be more willing to open up their wallets.

For his part, Beemer predicts that back-to-school sales will rise marginally this year, posting around a half-point or one-point increase.

The National Retail Federation will release its consumer spending survey, which forecasts how much consumers will spend on the occasion, in mid-July.

Summary: America's Research Group finds that 58 percent of parents said they would buy only the bare minimum during the traditional back-to-school season.


The opinion by Judge Barrington Parker focused on two major reasons for overturning the convictions: The court argued that the trial judge had not adequately instructed the jury on a technical matter, and that the definition of the crime requires that would-be traders know the tipster is receiving significant personal benefit from his or her actions.

That first opinion will not have long-lasting effects, but the latter point is "a pretty significant push back" on existing practice, said Rick Holwell, a former federal judge now in private practice.

"Until this decision, most commentators and most courts were of the view that—as a quasi-technical matter—the government had to prove that the tippee knows that the tipper has breached his fiduciary duty in return for some personal benefit," Holwell said. "But that standard was ridiculously low heretofore, and the standard was so negligible that it never really posed any problem to the prosecutor."

Read MoreThe truth about insider trading

In fact, to secure a conviction, prosecutors only needed to indicate that the tipper was leaking nonpublic information for the sake of friendship, Holwell said. Now, the government will be forced to prove that a trader knew of direct personal benefit to the source of a leak.

This change is "really going to hamstring the prosecutors," Holwell said, because most insider trading cases see information spread out semi-anonymously from its original source. Still, the new standards from the decision will require conclusive evidence on this matter in order to prove that traders knew they were doing something illegal.

"Some would argue you'd have to be brain-dead when you get this information not to know that there's illegality involved," Holwell said. "I think the decision is a little naive."

Read MoreInsider trading suspect bolts—barefoot—from cameras

Still, some legal experts said the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made the right decision Wednesday.

Yasho Lahiri, an attorney active in hedge fund law, said the ruling rightly will allow financial professionals to conduct fact-finding without fear that third-hand information can land them in prison.

"I think the important thing is that in order to have efficient markets you have to have incentives to do research," he said, adding that the only insider trading crimes now will involve direct bribes or "willful blindness" to such a situation.

Read MoreCommentary: It's time to legalize insider trading

"In my mind, while insider trading is bad—commercial bribery is egregious—what is not bad is the connect-the-dots approach to information. ... The reason hedge funds make money is they connect disparate sources of information," Lahiri said. "That ought not to be insider trading."

By redefining the crime of insider trading—a violation that is historically detailed in court decisions rather than legislation—the opinion also takes "a lot of air out of the much ballyhooed claim" from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara that he is cracking down "on what was represented to be rampant insider trading," Cotter said.

Summary: An appellate court decision significantly redefined insider trading, and may have altered the course of all further enforcement.


Although the small chain operates with fast food-like efficiency, its executives are betting on a different type of restaurant for today's taste buds.

"We agonize over seconds of serving the customer," said Mike Donahue, Lyfe Kitchen's co-founder and chief brand officer, about the company's 10-minute service goal (while that's slow for fast food, it's relatively speedy considering how much cooking occurs in the kitchen.)

Read MorePizza Inn: Don't call us Pizza Inn

Still in its infancy, the restaurant has grown quickly since launching its first outpost in 2011 in California. Donahue spent two decades at McDonald's before leaving, and later partnering with the fast food giant's former global president and COO Mike Roberts, to create Lyfe.

Lyfe Kitchen's recent opening in New York City marks its 14th restaurant and first on the East Coast. As it expands, CEO and President Chance Carlisle said franchising presents "a significant opportunity" for the company, which so far has been deliberately shy about signing franchise partners and only has two now.

"Our unit economic model says we can build a significant number of units—in the hundreds," said Carlislie, adding that right now it's focusing on developing the concept and other revenue channels, such as grab-and-go items.

Currently, the company's restaurants are profitable, although he added that it is "still a little bit heavy" with 14 outlets in its overhead costs.

"For our next phase, it really comes to a question with our investors of how much capital do we want to raise and how fast do we want to move, and there's a balance between raising destructive levels of capital today at a lower valuation and really speeding up for an exit or taking a slow and steady approach," said Carlisle, who also serves as a vice president at his family's company, Carlisle Corp.

Read MoreThe uphill battlefast food giants face in 2015

As a large Wendy's franchisee, Carlisle Corp. is no stranger to the hospitality business. After it sold a large chunk of its units in June, it bought a minority stake in Lyfe Kitchen.

Carlisle said he sees more opportunity in the category that Lyfe Kitchen plays in—what Donahue terms "lifestyle"— than traditional fast food or quick service restaurants (QSR).

Summary: With fast-food attention to detail and fine-dining tastes, Lyfe Kitchen is betting on a different type of restaurant.