Briefcase
Facebook hires talent from Gowalla
NEW YORK – Facebook has hired the team behind Gowalla, the location service that lets people share where they are using their mobile phones.
Gowalla started out in 2009 as a way for people to share their location with friends and strangers by “checking in.” Now, Facebook will wind down the service, as it often does when buying a startup to hire its talent. It did not acquire the Gowalla service or technology.
Financial terms were not given. Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams said in a blog post that Gowalla will join Facebook in California. Gowalla is currently headquartered in Austin, Texas.
“As we move forward, we hope some of the inspiration behind Gowalla – a fun and beautiful way to share your journey on the go – will live on at Facebook,” Williams wrote in the post.
Associated Press
Ticketmaster settlement leads to customer credits
LOS ANGELES – Customers who purchased tickets through Ticketmaster are getting notices that tell them they’ll soon receive credits for fees they were charged over the past decade.
Emails are going to customers who are entitled to the credits as part of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2003 in Los Angeles. A pair of men sued over fees they were charged for purchasing tickets to Wilco and Bruce Springsteen concerts.
A judge in October approved a preliminary settlement that will give customers a $1.50 credit for up to 17 tickets they purchased between specific dates in October 1999 and 2011. The settlement will be finalized in May.
Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation Inc.
Associated Press
Ex-HP chairwoman Dunn dies of ovarian cancer
SAN FRANCISCO – Patricia Dunn, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairwoman who authorized a boardroom surveillance probe that ultimately sullied her remarkable rise from investment bank typist to the corporate upper class, has died after a long bout with cancer. She was 58.
Dunn died Sunday morning at her home in Orinda surrounded by her family, according to her sister, Debbie Lammers. She said Dunn’s ovarian cancer had returned.
Dunn joined HP’s board in 1998 and was instrumental in the hiring and firing of CEO Carly Fiorina, whose flamboyant personality and ferocity in securing the $19 billion purchase of Compaq Computer Corp. ultimately helped hasten her ouster amid a sagging stock price and disappointing results from the combined company.
Dunn was the one who announced Fiorina’s ouster in February 2005 and named her low-key successor, Mark Hurd, previously CEO of NCR Corp.
Dunn also assumed Fiorina’s role as chairwoman at the time. Dunn was forced out in that role in September 2006 in an embarrassing scandal involving spying on the telephone records of board members and journalists to ferret out the source of leaks to the media.
Just a month later, California’s attorney general charged Dunn and four others with four felony counts each – conspiracy, fraud, identity theft and illegally using computer data – for their roles in the probe. That came just two days before she started chemotherapy treatments for advanced ovarian cancer.
The criminal charges against Dunn were eventually dropped, as prosecutors said she had little involvement in the actual “pretexting” – the ruse used by investigators to view private telephone records by pretending to be someone else – and because of her ailing health.
Associated Press