Seems Google is getting information about senior employees being recruited by Twitter, in order to make counter offers, TechCrunch reported.
Google offered about $150 million to keep two senior product managers offered the chief product role at Twitter earlier this year (though Business Insider claims those numbers are “tens of millions of dollars off” — but huge numbers regardless of the exact dollar figures).
“There’s lots to say about the statement Google is making with these counteroffers. “Don’t mess with us,” comes to mind. As well as “If you’re a Google employee and you aren’t out interviewing at Facebook, Twitter or Zynga you are a moron.”
Regardless, the fact that large fortunes are being handed out to mid level technical managers is somewhat of a red flag in general. That kind of money is usually reserved for founders of companies that make it to IPO. Actually, most IPO founders make substantially less than that.” TechCrunch reported.
Meanwhile, the information Google is getting access to suggests someone at Twitter is sharing information. Twitter had a problem with leaked info a couple of years ago when their internal strategy meeting notes were made public and Google may have started taking notice.
“Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, “Can we do to Google what Google has done to others?”
BUFFALO, N.Y., March 21 (UPI) — A New York state judge has barred appliance parts firm 1st Source Servall from soliciting business from a rival firm’s client list due to corporate espionage.
State Supreme Court Justice John Michalek, in a 21-page injunction said, “Unrebutted evidence now demonstrates” two former Marcone Supply company employees “intentionally took and/or received” customer information from their former employer, The Buffalo News reported Monday.
With the list in hand, Marcone employee Mark Creighton resigned from his job April 20, 2010, and “within six days became Servall’s vice president of sales for the Northeast Region,” the judge wrote.
In addition, the judge said Creighton admitted he destroyed memory sticks and a computer hard drive that contained information about 3,300 Marcone customers.
The judge’s injunction is limited to the top 640 clients on Marcone’s customer list. Marcone attorney James Donathen called the situation “serious” and “a classic case of corporate espionage.”
Marcone lost $12 million worth of business in 2010 because of the theft, the company said.
“I think the main reason they’re suing Servall is that Servall is No. 2, and a lot of customers are better off with Servall,” Servall attorney B. Kevin Burke Jr. said.
“Customers are better served if there is competition,” Burke said.
When Marcone Supply bought a competitor last year, it looked
like the sort of low-risk deal that happens all the time in
unglamorous industries like appliance parts.
Marcone, a 79-year-old parts distributor in Creve Coeur, was
already No. 1 in its industry. Several previous acquisitions had
extended its geographic reach, and buying Buffalo-based AP Wagner
would solidify its position in the Northeast.
A few months after the deal closed, however, Marcone noticed
that many of Wagner’s best customers were no longer placing orders.
A few months after that, Marcone filed a lawsuit accusing two
former employees and a competing company, Detroit-based 1st Source
Servall, of corporate espionage.
Parts of the case, a court document says, would be “appropriate
for a John LeCarré novel.” The suit alleges that one of the
ex-employees tried to destroy evidence of his theft by crushing
memory sticks in a vise and taking a hammer to a hard drive.
LeCarré’s spies, no doubt, would find more creative ways of
covering their tracks. But the novelist might not have imagined
that something as prosaic as a customer list could be at the center
of a high-stakes dispute.
The trouble, Marcone Vice President David Ganz says, is that the
list contains much more than names and addresses. It had data on
past orders, pricing and credit history.
Somebody with access to that data could quickly set up a
competing operation and grab Marcone’s best customers. And that,
the lawsuit alleges, is just what Servall did.
The Detroit company, which didn’t have much presence in the
Northeast before, hired Karl Rosenhahn and Mark Creighton, the two
former Wagner executives who are co-defendants in Marcone’s suit.
After they began using the list, Ganz says, Marcone identified 640
customers whose orders dried up. The loss of sales, he says,
amounted to $12 million last year.
Marcone’s suit doesn’t specify a damage amount, and no trial
date has been set. New York Justice John Michalek did, though,
issue an order last month that prohibits Servall from soliciting
business from Marcone’s customers. A New York appellate court
upheld the order on March 10, with a modification that allows
Servall to accept unsolicited orders from those customers.
Servall issued a statement calling the appellate ruling “a
significant victory” and saying that it wants to serve “customers
impacted by Marcone’s recent poor service and price gouging.”
Ganz, the Marcone executive, points out that it’s Servall
employees who have admitted unethical behavior. Rosenhahn and
Creighton first denied that they had taken any confidential
information, then admitted the theft after Marcone got court
permission to examine their computers.
Ganz also says that Marcone reduced some of Wagner’s prices,
kept most of its employees and invested more than $1 million in its
offices and warehouses. The merger wasn’t, in other words, a
slash-and-burn deal.
“It should have strengthened both entities,” he said. “Last
year, instead of being kind of a fun year with new people and new
locations, it wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t fun.”
Michael Moberly, a security consultant and founder of Knowledge
Protection Strategies in University City, says information-theft
cases like this are not unusual. “We have this natural tendency to
want to trust our employees; we want to trust everybody,” he
said.
The highest-profile cases, Moberly says, involve high-tech
companies whose employees spirit away a key software program or a
new microchip design. But all companies — even those whose business
revolves around mundane things like hoses and dishwasher racks —
have valuable know-how and customer-relationship data.
And, as Marcone learned the hard way, information in the wrong
hands can do a lot of damage.
Middleware giant Software AG conducted an elaborate corporate espionage scheme replete with “sex, lies and an audiotape,” according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by RFID (radio frequency identification) vendor GlobeRanger.
GlobeRanger, of Richardson, Texas, “poured a decade of work and tens of millions of dollars into developing technology that is truly transformative and promised to exponentially facilitate the flow of goods and information throughout the world,” according to its complaint, which was originally filed in a Dallas County, Texas, court in December and moved to federal court this month.
Software AG, which dwarfs GlobeRanger in size, “had an irresistible motive,” the complaint adds. “It stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars from stealing GlobeRanger’s technology and attaching it to a product already deployed in tens of thousands of companies worldwide.”
RFID technology is not new, GlobeRanger’s complaint notes. But its platform is “a true chameleon” that can be deployed in any enterprise within two to three months, it claims.
Its products are used to track crime scene evidence in Holland and monitor the removal of hazardous materials from a Tennessee nuclear site, the complaint states. It even “knows just where ‘your dollop of Daisy’ sour cream is between farm and market.”
GlobeRanger has also won contracts making it “the enterprise standard” for the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Air Force, according to the complaint.
Software AG’s April 2007 purchase of middleware vendor WebMethods for US$546 million is at the root of the conspiracy alleged in GlobeRanger’s filing.
“WebMethods was worth so much because it is literally everywhere — in every industry, every sized enterprise,” the complaint states. An integration between RFID technology and WebMethods would constitute a “holy grail” and a “massive home run” for Software AG, it adds.
However, WebMethods was not developed with RFID in mind, according to the complaint.
Now with WebMethods in hand, it would be years before Software AG could develop a viable RFID product, leading the company to make a brazen move, according to the complaint.
“Software AG had just spent a half a billion dollars. It had to show returns on this investment,” it states. “Software AG decided that it would develop an RFID Solution through corporate espionage.”
GlobeRanger’s complaint also names two systems integrators it had worked with, Main Sail and Naniq Systems, as defendants.
A director at Naniq, Kim Gray, “was unusually successful” at winning contracts from the Navy’s Automatic Identification Technology Office, according to the complaint, which said, “She was also having an improper relationship with Bob Bacon, the married head of Navy AIT.” Gray was also “involved with a man at Software AG,” it alleges.
Seoul (The Korea Herald/ANN) – South Korea concluded Friday (March 25) that the recent sex scandal involving several of its officials in Shanghai and a young Chinese woman was not a case of espionage, avoiding diplomatic fallout with China which has been closely monitoring the investigations.
Several officials, including former Consul General Kim Jung-ki, underwent government investigation over allegations they leaked confidential state information to a married Chinese woman while working in Shanghai.
Deng Xinming, the 33-year-old housewife at the center of the scandal, disappeared from the public eye after news broke earlier this month, also avoiding a probe by the Seoul investigation team which had been in Shanghai last week.
We recognize this case as an incident caused by serious indiscipline of officials at overseas missions, which led to leakage of some state information, illegal visa issuances and inappropriate relationships,” Kim Seok-min, deputy minister of Seouls Prime Ministers Office, said in a news briefing.
Officials had made the mistake of conducting anomalous diplomacy relying on unofficial and inappropriate sources such as the accused Chinese woman and were found to have had inappropriate relationships at hotels in China, Kim said, adding that more than 10 related officials will be punished.
Deng appears to have approached the Korean officials mainly for help with visa issuances. About 19 state documents did leak via the Shanghai mission, but none of them are considered information that calls for legal action, the Prime Ministers Office said.
Korean officials at the Shanghai mission were initially suspected of passing classified government files to Deng, which were said to include contact information of some 200 high-ranking Korean officials and the schedule of President Lee Myung-bak.
When the scandal was first reported earlier this month, some speculated that Deng was an A-class spy hired by her government, citing her wealth and way of dealing with men.
The Chinese government expressed regrets about Seoul turning the incident into a spy case, its main newspaper warning of negative effects on Seoul-Beijing ties unless the case was quietly dealt with in an editorial.
After the government investigation results were made public, the Foreign Ministry said it would sternly deal with the officials involved, including former consular chief Kim.
The ministry also said it would conduct stricter inspection of its officials at overseas missions and recall anyone with disciplinary problems.
The latest scandal was unveiled shortly after the Foreign Ministry announced a set of reform measures to overcome a nepotism scandal that led to the resignation of its minister, dealing another blow to the ministry often considered an organization of elites.
