A crew member holds a magnum of Tattinger champagne during the Monaco Yacht Show.
Managing the life of Sergey Brin is big business.
Through Bayshore Global Management, the Google Inc. co-founder has hired former bankers and philanthropy experts to help manage his $30.1 billion fortune. He’s employed a former Navy SEAL and SWAT team veteran for security, and a yacht captain to handle his aquatic endeavors. A fitness coordinator, a photographer and archivist help run his life.
Bayshore, based in Los Altos, California, provides a glimpse into the services family offices bestow upon the wealthy beyond investing and accounting. As the number of billionaires has surged worldwide in recent years, demand for people who can provide niche skills -- and discretion -- has jumped.
“Family offices are expanding and people are setting new ones up,” said Natasha Pearl, chief executive officer of Aston Pearl, which serves single-family offices that have at least $400 million. “It’s increasing demand for employees who can be trusted to keep the families’ private lives confidential.”
There are now more than 14,600 families with at least $100 million in assets globally, up 42 percent since 2008, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Many of these have set up their own offices to help manage investments and day-to-day lives. The firms employ about 20,000 people, according to London-based researcher Campden Wealth, which started collecting the data last year.
Vulcan, Microsoft
Family offices serving the world’s billionaires usually employ at least 50 people, with staff across multiple teams including executive, administrative and investment groups, according to Campden Wealth data.
Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based company created by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and his sister Jody Allen, has more than 500 people. The family office features an in-house media company, a 17-member team managing a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio and a division that’s working on space travel. Vulcan is also currently hiring a chief investment officer and wildlife conservation expert among other positions, according to its website.
Allen, who has a net worth of $17 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, named Vulcan after the Roman god of fire. He’s also a Star Trek fan. Alexa Rudin, a spokeswoman for Vulcan, declined to comment.
Bayshore gets its name from the location of Google’s headquarters, an area in California known as North Bayshore. It’s existed since at least 2006, two years after Google, the world’s largest search engine, had its initial public offering.
Goldman, Deutsche
The company’s employees have been recruited from Google, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and other family offices, according to LinkedIn profiles that list Bayshore as their employer. It has employed at least 47 people according to Department of Labor filings. These include a chief of staff and manager of the family’s New York City home, who oversaw construction, recruited domestic staff and provided personal shopping.
Brin also owns Passerelle Investment Co., a real estate firm. It’s bought properties in Los Altos to help revitalize the town for businesses and families, according to Passerelle’s website.
Representatives for Bayshore declined to comment.
Brin, 41, emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union as a child with his family. He also runs the Brin Wojcicki Foundation with his wife, Anne, that disburses charitable donations and supports human rights.
No Registration
Brin is the 21st richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg ranking. Controlling a fortune of that size requires professional security. Bayshore’s brought in the former Navy SEAL to provide protection, according to a LinkedIn profile. A former U.S. Secret Service agent directed security programs, and a former SWAT team operator oversees the family’s properties and emergency procedures.
Some of the largest family offices have operation centers to monitor people and property, said Christopher Falkenberg, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and founder of New York-based Insite Security that provides protection services to clients such as family offices.
There are layers of personnel including former military and law enforcement experts who are responsible for locks on doors and gates, background checks on staff, and managing travel and aircraft security, Falkenberg said.
They don’t come cheap. A security director who’s a former FBI agent can command at least $200,000 a year, he said. That can be double a typical salary working for the government.
Private Chefs
Salaries at family offices vary widely, said Pearl, whose New York-based firm has helped families hire cybersecurity experts, find college advisers and create procedures for staff at multiple residences.
Private chefs can command salaries from $40,000 to as much as $200,000 a year with full benefits depending on whether they have top restaurant experience and have worked with other wealthy families, Pearl said. College-adviser fees, a growing area, can range from $5,000 to $25,000.
“It’s not like the ‘blue book’ where you look up chief risk officers or chefs and there are standard comp rates,” she said. “It’s a very fragmented market.”
After 50 years, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prediction about semiconductor miniaturization still holds up.
When I was a kid, I got an idea from a puzzle book which I believed in my childlike way would make me fabulously wealthy in just a few weeks. The trick was to convince my mother to pay me a progressively doubling wage for doing household chores for a month—a penny on the first day, two cents on the second, four on the third, and so on.
Unfortunately for me, my mom was too bright to take me up on the offer. So I missed out on collecting $10.7 million and change after 30 days of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and the like. Fortunately for all of us, the semiconductor industry did accept Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore's challenge to do something similar 50 years ago—and we continue to reap the benefits today.
Back in 1965, Moore, then the director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked by Electronics magazine to submit an article making a prediction for developments in the semiconductor component industry over the following decade. So for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics published on April 19, 1965, Moore noted that the number of transistor and resistor elements on computer chips had been doubling roughly every year—and that he expected this to keep happening for the next 10 years.
It was a prediction that ended up extending far past its first decade. And what later became known as "Moore's Law" would prove to be perhaps the most reliable and enduring guide to the pace of technological advance in not just the semiconductor business, but in the computing industry as a whole.
But back in April 1965, Moore's observation, accompanied with a simple graph he'd sketched, wasn't even regarded as cover story material in Electronics. Instead, you had to thumb forward to page 99 to find the Intel co-founder's prophetic pronouncement amidst the writings of other industry experts. For just 75 cents, you'd have had the very first iteration of Moore's Law in your grubby hands, but finding it wasn't easy.
In an interview earlier this year, Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968 with the late Robert Noyce, explained how the whole thing came about after Electronics asked him for the article.
"I took the opportunity to look at what had happened up to that time. This would have been in 1964, I guess. And I looked at the few chips we had made and noticed we went from a single transistor on a chip to a chip with about eight elements—transistors and resistors—on it," said the 86-year-old chairman emeritus of Intel.
"The new chips coming out had about twice the number of elements, about 16. And in the laboratory, we were creating chips with about 30 elements and we were looking at the possibility of making chips with twice that many, around 60 elements on a chip. Well, I plotted these on a piece of semi-log paper starting with the planar transistor in 1959 and noticed that, essentially, we were doubling every year.
"So I took a wild extrapolation and said we're going to continue doubling every year and go from about 60 elements at the time to 60,000 in 10 years."
To make things even more interesting, Moore himself did not at the time regard this remarkable prediction of exponential growth in integrated circuit (IC) complexity to be the most important point of his article. Instead, he was trying to stress that making ICs was going to get cheaper to do over time—potentially, a whole lot cheaper.
"I was just trying to communicate the point that this was the direction semiconductors were going," he said. "And this was going to give a tremendous cost advantage, which wasn't true at the time. The early integrated circuits cost quite a bit more than the pieces to assemble the similar circuits out of individual components.
"But one could see the trend was going in the direction that this was going to be the cheaper way eventually. That was my real objective—to communicate that we have a technology that's going to make electronics cheap. But I didn't expect this binary order of magnitude increase, the thousand-fold increase in complexity to be very accurate."
The accelerated pace of early IC manufacturing slowed a bit in ensuing years. Moore later revised his timetable for the doubling of transistor density in microchips from one year to two. More recently, we've seen the cadence at which Intel and other leading semiconductor manufacturers ramp new process technologies range from about 18 to 32 months.
Making Moore's Law Happen
Of course, the continued relevance of Moore's Law hasn't just happened by magic. Moore's prediction, while remaining accurate for 50 years, isn't actually a natural "law" like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Shrinking the size of elements on computer chips so consistently and for so many decades has required incredible innovations like CMOS, silicon straining, VLSI, immersion lithography, high-k dielectrics, and most recently, FinFET or tri-gate "3D" transistor process technology. Those advances didn't just appear out of thin air because Moore's Law demanded they happen—brilliant, doggedly persistent people working in labs at universities and companies like Bell, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild, Intel, Toshiba, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, TSMC, Samsung, and elsewhere invented them and thushelped extend Moore's Law, not the other way around.
Moore made his original prediction about the pace of miniaturization in computer chip components as a way to highlight the attractive economics in semiconductor manufacturing. By his own admission, he wasn't terribly confident that it would hold up over time. But in the ensuing decades, Moore's Law has become as much a challenge to the industry to keep it alive as an axiom for how chipmaking works.
I never managed to trick my mom into paying me a fortune to make my bed for a month. But 50 years ago, Moore set the wheels in motion for an entire industry to dedicate itself to producing increasingly complex integrated circuits to make progressively more powerful computers and devices. As a child, I thought it would be really cool if I could use math to turn a penny into millions. Way cooler—and far more beneficial to all of us—is that we've turned transistors that were once the size of a human hand into nanoscale electronic switches powering smartphone supercomputers we can fit in our pockets.
Moore's Law has presided over that astonishing process of human ingenuity for the past 50 years. It's still holding up even as we approach atomic-scale limitations in making circuitry even smaller than it is today—a possible end of the road for Moore's enduring insight, or perhaps just the next great challenge.
When a prediction as elegant and impactful as Moore's Law holds up for 50 years, people tend to notice. PCMag asked several notable industry analysts to discuss the importance of Moore's famous observation and its legacy for the computer industry and the world.
Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT:
"The 50th anniversary of Moore's Law highlights an interesting issue—that the tech industry loves to talk about the importance of innovation but continuing relevance is a much rarer commodity. Originally, Gordon Moore was making a simple observation about the brevity of time required for significant technological advancement. But for half a century now, semiconductors, microprocessors, and related computing components have continued to evolve at the torrid pace Moore observed.
"The nature of physical materials means that Moore's Law will eventually hit a literal stopping point—you can't scale semiconductors smaller than a single atom. But I believe new innovations will arise that will allow digital technology to advance and improve at the 18-24 month pace Gordon Moore originally observed. As a result, I believe Moore's Law will remain relevant for years or even decades more to come."
Jack Gold, principal analyst, J.Gold Associates:
"Fundamentally, Moore's Law (and its effect/consequences) has probably done more to fundamentally change how all of us live, work, and learn than anything else in history. Fifty years ago, who would have thought that we would be carrying supercomputers in our pockets? Who would have foreseen the wireless and mobile revolution? Who would have thought that companies like Google could instantly parse the entire Internet and give us information ... and who would have envisioned tens of billions of users on the Internet to begin with?
"Moore's Law is not dead yet and it's unlikely to die for at least a couple more generations of chips. But I suggest it won't really die for many more years, as scientists and engineers continually find new ways to extend it. I am confident they will find new ways (e.g., 3D chips, organics) to continue the fundamental premise of the law, even if it's not quite what Moore had in mind."
Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy:
"Fifty years after Gordon Moore penned his observation now known as Moore's Law, why does it still matter? It matters because it is still the rallying cry in the tech industry to double transistors densities every two years. This then leads to higher performance and lower power technology.
"While Moore's Law is fairly well-known and (mostly) understood within the tech industry, thinking beyond the tech industry, why should people care? What has Moore's Law done for the economy, and for society, for our daily lives? Moore's Law has impacted almost the entire fabric our lives. It has enabled most of the comforts many of us take for granted, like quality of our health care and medications, safety of our cars, the ability for us to get almost everything we want from our very fingertips.
"In the past decade alone, we've seen countless firsts: The first YouTube video, the founding of Twitter, the introduction of the original iPhone and the iPad, the first Netflix movie streamed and much more. Where do you think we'd be without Moore's Law driving the evolution of technology?
"The reality is that without Moore's Law, we wouldn't have the technology that we love today ... smartphones, tablets, PCs, game consoles, 4K displays. We wouldn't have content like Twitter, Netflix, and YouTube.
"Assuming Moore's Law continues to drive the industry for the next 10-15 years, what might be possible? I think we will see some amazing breakthroughs. Self-driving cars will be commonplace. We will all have some kind of robot helping us in our homes and hospitals. We could finally cure cancer. There's a chance we can extend out lifespans considerably.
"Moore's Law isn't the beginning or the end of innovation. It takes breakthrough architectures, collaboration, software, and other advancements to make all these innovations come to life. But without the industry driving to Moore's law, we wouldn't even have had a chance at accomplishing all the wonderful things we have today and building even better technology in the future."
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, Intel has put together a timeline and some facts and figures illustrating just how far we've come in the past several decades—and how mind-bogglingly small chip circuitry is today compared to the transistors Moore and his colleagues were working with in 1965.
Just to get things started, the chip giant noted that Moore's original purpose of highlighting just how inexpensive making semiconductor components was about to become has proven prophetic beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
"Around the time that Gordon Moore made his now-famous observation, Fairchild Semiconductor, where he worked at the time, sold transistors for $150 each. Today the price-per-transistor of Intel's Core i5 processor is $0.00000014. Put another way, you could buy 70,000 Core i5 transistors for a penny," an Intel spokesman said.
Here are some more fun facts and figures illustrating the impact of Moore's Law, courtesy of Intel:
CARS: If automobile fuel efficiency improved at the pace of Moore's Law, a person could easily drive a car for his entire life on a single tank of gas. With the pace at which transistors have shrunk, your car would be the size of an ant.
CONSTRUCTION: If a skyscraper fell in price at the pace of Moore's Law, a person could purchase one for less than the cost of a PC today. And if a skyscraper increased in height at the pace of Moore's Law, it would be 35 times the height of Mt. Everest.
REAL ESTATE: If house prices fell at the same rate as transistors, a person could purchase a home for the price of a piece of candy.
SPACE EXPLORATION: The Apollo space program to land humans on the Moon cost $25 billion. If prices fell at the pace of Moore's Law, today that program would cost about as much as a small private plane. The trip to the Moon in 1969 took three days. If Moore's Law applied to space travel, that trip would now take one minute.
AIR TRAVEL: A flight from New Zealand to New York would be over in the time it takes to fasten your seatbelt, if Moore's Law were operative.
Moore's Law-driven innovation has resulted in astonishing leaps in the power of Intel's current processors compared with its own technology of several decades ago, the chip giant notes:
If an Intel-based Android phone were built using 1971 technology, the phone's microprocessor alone would be the size of a parking space. Try taking a selfie with that.
Compared to Intel's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, today's 14nm processors deliver 3,500 times the performance, at 90,000 times the efficiency, and at 1/ 60,000th the cost.
The first semiconductor transistors were the size of an eraser at the end of a pencil. As a result of Moore's Law, more than six million of today's tri-gate transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence.
Today's transistors are invisible to the naked eye. To see a single transistor, you'd have to enlarge a typical chip to the size of a house.
Amazing stuff and here's how it all went down at Intel in the years following the first formulation of Moore's Law:
Situación económica en la región, repercusiones en Uruguay
Las
nuevas autoridades de gobierno anunciaron su objetivo de hacer converger
a la inflación al centro del rango meta del 5%, en un horizonte de 18 meses.
En primera instancia esta noticia es una señal positiva para la economÃa en
general y a su vez juega un rol fundamental en la formación de expectativas,
de todas formas ¿están dadas la condiciones macroeconómicas para que dicha
meta sea alcanzable?.
El
contexto regional desfavorable presiona a la economÃa uruguaya a la búsqueda
de nuevas alternativas para mitigar el impacto de los shocks externos
negativos sobre los niveles de actividad de los diferentes sectores,
principalmente aquellos vinculados directamente con el comercio regional,
tanto en materia de bienes como servicios.
Summary:Did you know there are really two main versions of Android? The one Google controls is under fire for potential antitrust practices. Here's why.
After five years of investigation, the European Commission (EC) has sent a formal statement of objections to Google, based on the company's business practices in that region. The main focus is on how Google promotes its own comparison shopping results over that of rivals. Android is in the spotlight too, however: the EC is launching a separate antitrust probe into Google's operating system, which powers more than 80 percent of the world's mobile devices.
How can that be when Android is open source? For one thing, it depends on which version of Android you're talking about since there are really two.
There is a world of operating systems beyond Android and iOS. Will any of them lock down third place? Can any of them give Google or Apple a run for the top spots?
Android itself, or more accurately, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is an open source operating system that anyone can freely use or modify for devices. If I wanted to build my own phone and could get Android running on it, I can do so. Indeed, Amazon has done exactly this with its line of Fire phones and tablets, using the open source software as a base platform and then adding its own custom interface, apps and services.
This the base, freely available Android software but with added Google services and apps. Google's hardware partners -- think Samsung, Motorola, and HTC to name a few -- generally choose this version of Android and everything that comes with it. Meaning, these hardware companies enter into an agreement with Google to license the Google apps and services on devices. That includes Gmail, Google Maps, the Google Play Store and more.
Without these add-ons, the device makers would have to create their own ecosystem of Android-compatible apps. Some have tried. Samsung is a good example: It has built (or bought) music services, its own Samsung Apps store, and created its S-Voice software for voice commands on its phones.
This process to license Google's version of Android isn't new. Although the agreements have surely been modified since 2008 when Android launched, they've been in place for nearly seven years. So what's the issue?
There are actually three issues, according to the EC's press release explaining what it will be focusing on in its Android probe.
Whether Google has illegally hindered the development and market access of rival mobile applications or services by requiring or incentivising smartphone and tablet manufacturers to exclusively pre-install Google's own applications or services;
Whether Google has prevented smartphone and tablet manufacturers who wish to install Google's applications and services on some of their Android devices from developing and marketing modified and potentially competing versions of Android (so-called "Android forks") on other devices, thereby illegally hindering the development and market access of rival mobile operating systems and mobile applications or services;
Whether Google has illegally hindered the development and market access of rival applications and services by tying or bundling certain Google applications and services distributed on Android devices with other Google applications, services and/or application programming interfaces of Google.
All of these have an anti-competitive theme, of course.; it's the main reason for the complaint.
As a result, the EC will likely be trying to get a long, hard look at the closely-guarded agreements that Google offers to potential hardware partners, who then decide if they want to enter into those agreements. This is less about the two flavors of Android and far more about what hardware vendors give up in order to use Google's version of Android, although Google will surely try to shift attention to the former aspect.
The probe is just getting started so this will be a lengthy process to investigate the three main objections. My early take is that Google will have the most challenge with the first two of the EC concerns.
The first one has some precedent in that Microsoft was fined by the EU in 2007 for abusing its dominant market position by requiring hardware partners to bundle certain software with Windows. The second EC complaint will depend on the wording of agreements that partners enter into with Google; if indeed there is some exclusivity language restricting hardware companies from using both the AOSP version of Android and Google's version on different devices, the EC will have a strong case.
"While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem. By joining the Open Handset Alliance, each member contributes to and builds one Android platform -- not a bunch of incompatible versions."
As far as the third EC issue goes, I think it's the weakest of the bunch. At this point in time, you really can't have a cohesive mobile ecosystem without tying some apps and services together. Other device makers do this already; Apple being a prime example with its proprietary operating system and rules for apps that are built on it.
Whether Google has implemented this in a fashion that goes against the EC's antitrust laws is another matter, of course. Either way, I have a feeling we're about to get a closer look at those well-guarded agreements -- or parts of them, at least -- that Google requires its hardware partners to sign before using the company's Android apps and services.
Continuous Web site defacements are being perpetrated by individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). The defacements have affected Web site operations and the communication platforms of news organizations, commercial entities, religious institutions, federal/state/local governments, foreign governments, and a variety of other domestic and international Web sites. Although the defacements demonstrate low-level hacking sophistication, they are disruptive and often costly in terms of lost business revenue and expenditures on technical services to repair infected computer systems.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Researchers continue to identify WordPress Content Management System (CMS) plug-in vulnerabilities, which could allow malicious actors to take control of an affected system. Some of these vulnerabilities were exploited in the recent Web site defacements noted above. Software patches are available for identified vulnerabilities.
Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could result in an attacker gaining unauthorized access, bypassing security restrictions, injecting scripts, and stealing cookies from computer systems or network servers. An attacker could install malicious software; manipulate data; or create new accounts with full user privileges for future Web site exploitation.
THREAT
The FBI assesses that the perpetrators are not members of the ISIL terrorist organization. These individuals are hackers using relatively unsophisticated methods to exploit technical vulnerabilities and are utilizing the ISIL name to gain more notoriety than the underlying attack would have otherwise garnered. Methods being utilized by hackers for the defacements indicate that individual Web sites are not being directly targeted by name or business type. All victims of the defacements share common WordPress plug-in vulnerabilities easily exploited by commonly available hacking tools.
DEFENSE
The FBI recommends the following actions be taken:
Summary:Within two hours of the Apple Watch debuting at retail stores and online, it sold out, pushing delivery times until mid-June for many irate customers.
Apple's debut wearable is out -- and it's gone already.
Prospective buyers woke up during the late-evening and early morning to snap up the Apple Watch, but many were left disappointed.
Within an hour or two, stock had sold out and delivery times were pushed back to June -- long after the April 24 date when devices were due to start shipping.
Many took to Twitter to complain. Some users said they would not buy the wearable as a result.
In a statement Thursday,Apple's retail chief Angela Ahrendts said the company will only take orders "exclusively online during the initial launch period" in order to maintain a consistent experience.
But demand appears to be high, considering the reviews were not all in the watch's favor.
"The watch is beautiful and promising -- the most ambitious wearable that exists. But in an attempt to do everything in the first generation, the Apple Watch still leaves plenty to be desired," said CNET senior editor Scott Stein in his hands-on review.
