It’s getting bare-knuckled out there again in the ride-hailing wars.
According to a report earlier today from The Information, newly public Lyft threatened Morgan Stanley with legal action earlier this week, demanding in a letter that the powerful investment bank stop marketing a short-selling product that it believed was disrupting trading in its stock.
It says Lyft learned about the product through the New York Post, which reported in its own, separate story early this week that Morgan Stanley — the lead underwriter for Uber’s IPO — had been calling pre-IPO investors in Lyft’s offering and pitching them on a way to lock in gains, regardless of Lyft’s lockup agreements with those investors.
It all sounds like the dirty pool we’ve grown accustomed to seeing between the rival companies and their associates. But Morgan Stanley spokesman Mark Lake tells TechCrunch that the New York Post report was flat-out wrong, providing us with the following statement: “Morgan Stanley did not market or execute, directly or indirectly, a sale, short sale, hedge, swap, or transfer of risk or value associated with Lyft’s stock for any Lyft shareholder identified by the company or otherwise known to us to be the subject of a Lyft lock-up agreement.
“Our firm’s activities have been in the normal course of market making, and any suggestion that Morgan Stanley engaged in an effort to apply short pressure to Lyft is false.”
What went wrong is hard to know, given that the Post shielded its sources. But it was highly descriptive in how it characterized the purported short-selling scheme. From its story:
Driving the unusual bets is language in Lyft’s lock-up agreements that has hedge funds and other early Lyft investors giving themselves a green light to make limited “short” bets, which make money on a stock’s decline. The goal is to position the bets in such a way that investors don’t benefit from a decline or a rise in the stock, but simply to lock in their IPO gains, which were significant.
“If I can lock in $70 now, I’m going to do that,” said an investor.
“Lyft made a mistake,” one investor who bought into Lyft shares prior to the IPO told The Post. “People who own the stock are allowed to hedge their positions. You are not allowed to reduce your economic interest.”
The investor was referring to a recent e-mail Lyft sent to investors reminding them that they are not allowed to engage in any transactions that might affect a holder’s “economic interest ” in the stock. This — and other “lock-up” language around the IPO — has Lyft investors protecting against a decline in an amount identical to their stock holdings, rather than betting on the stock’s decline.
We’ve reached out to Lyft for comment, which has yet to respond.
A source familiar with the situation confirms that Lyft’s ire with Morgan Stanley rests entirely on that Post piece, as noted in The Information. We’re told that no further action has been taken, beyond the letter sent to the bank by Lyft’s attorneys.
Whether the story ends here remains to be seen. The Information has updated its original post to include part of Morgan Stanley’s statement of denial, but it continues to report that, according to one of its sources, Morgan Stanley had been calling early Lyft investors for weeks during its roadshow and pitching them on a short-selling transaction that would enable them to lock in gains, regardless of the lockup.
Assuming Morgan Stanley is telling the truth — and we can’t imagine the bank would go on the record otherwise — there’s still the question of who floated misinformation about a short-selling product in the first place. It may be one that regulators want to dig into. Stay tuned.
Source: TechCrunch
Catch up on the most important news today in 2 minutes or less.
Source: Wired
Two passports, three voice recorders, one gas mask: How journalist Kenneth R. Rosen reports his stories from conflict zones in the Middle East.
Source: Wired
Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab is probably best known as the birthplace of the modular snake robot. Initially designed to squeeze into tight spots for search and rescue missions and infrastructure inspections, the lab’s snake robot has given rise to an army of different projects, and at least one Pittsburgh-area startup.
Several years ago, the robot became modular, allowing engineers to mix and match pieces and replace malfunctioning segments. From those modules, the team of CMU students have built a wide range of different projects, including a spider-like hexapod robot, whose six limbs are constructed from robotic segments. We also spent time with Hebi, whose modular robotic actuators commercialized versions of the lab’s research.
When we returned to the lab two years later, the researchers had an entirely new project to show us. “Students in this group are very self-directed, we come up with our own projects,” CMU doctoral student Julian Whitman explained. “We’re often inspired by the ability of our hardware to reconfigure into any kind of shapes. Sometimes people will look at a pile of modules. So they’ll build that and very quickly program it to do some kind of interesting behavior, and sometimes that’ll spur an entirely new research direction.”
Whitman’s project fashions the modules into a wearable extra limb. The system, he’s quick to point out, isn’t an exoskeleton. Instead, it’s a robotic arm mounted to a backpack-style support structure. The idea behind the project is to allow wearers to complete jobs that are a bit too complex for just two hands.
“One somewhat common task in automotive assembly or airplane assembly is to hold something up over your head and fix it to the ceiling,” Whitman explained, before demoing the action at a nearby workstation. “So if you’re putting a part on the bottom of a car or on the roof of an airplane, oftentimes in industry, they have to have two people working on this job, one guy is just holding the part up in place, the other one’s fixing it.”
The project currently supports one limb, controlled using a game pad. Whitman explained it’s possible to add as many limbs “as a person can carry,” for a more Dr. Octopus-style approach. But the biggest limitation is how many a wearer can control at a given time.
“Right now I’m controlling it with a button or with voice commands, so you now have two sets of buttons and two sets of voice commands,” Whitman said. “At some point, it becomes harder for the user to control it and becomes less useful, the more arms you add. But in the future we’re hoping to have these arms be more autonomous that have their own perception, their own decision-making processes.”
Source: TechCrunch
Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you.
But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud spend raised eyebrows. You see, the company is spending $750 million a year on cloud services, more specifically for AWS. When your business is primarily focused on photos and video, and needs to scale at a regular basis, that bill is going to be high.
That price tag prompted Erica Joy, a Microsoft engineer, to publish this tweet and start a little internal debate here at TechCrunch. Startups, after all, have a dog in this fight, and it’s worth exploring if the cloud is helping feed the startup ecosystem, or sending your bills soaring, as they have with Pinterest.
For starters, it’s worth pointing out that Ms. Joy works for Microsoft, which just happens to be a primary competitor of Amazon’s in the cloud business. Regardless of her personal feelings on the matter, I’m sure Microsoft would be more than happy to take over that $750 million bill from Amazon. It’s a nice chunk of business; but all that aside, do startups benefit from having access to cloud vendors?
Source: TechCrunch
Review: Dread and old-school shocks fill this new version of the horror best-seller.
Source: CNET
The new movie, with James Gunn directing, is called The Suicide Squad, and some actors will return.
Source: CNET
Update: I just finished Captain America: Winter Soldier. My favorite so far is The Avengers. Nine down, 12 to go, and the clock is ticking.
Source: CNET
This morning, The WSJ reported Apple’s streaming music service overtook Spotify in paid subscribers in the U.S., and now it hopes to do the same in the Indian market by way of a big price cut. The company’s individual plan in India is now 99 rupees per month ($1.43 USD), versus the 120 rupees per month ($1.73 USD) it was previously.
In addition, the price for the Apple Music student plan dropped from 60 rupees per month to 49 rupees; and the Family Plan is now 149 rupees per month versus the 190 rupees per month it was before the price cuts.
The news was first reported by The Indian Express and was shared across social media.
The new, lower prices are available to both existing subscribers and new customers, it appears.
India is a crucial market for streaming services, and one that’s a more recent battleground for major U.S. tech companies in addition to Spotify.
In March, YouTube Music and its paid subscription service, YouTube Premium, launched in India, following Amazon and Google which already operate their music services in the region. This year, Spotify also entered India amid a complicated licensing dispute with Warner Music, which impacted the number of tracks available.
But these companies aren’t just duking it out with one another for domination.
India today has a rich music scene which includes local players like Gaana, JioSaavn (created via the JioMusic and Saavn merger), Wynk, and others.
And recently, JioSaavn and Gaana both slashed their annual subscription prices by 70 percent. Those cuts were focused on locking down customers for a year – keeping them away from YouTube, Spotify and Apple, as a result. The recently discounts saw JioSaavn’s premium tier drop to Rs 299 per year – 70 percent down from Rs 999. Meanwhile,Gaana Plus was discounted to Rs 298 per year instead of Rs 1098, as before.
Apple doesn’t disclose its Apple Music subscriber count in India, but it has 56 million subscribers on a global basis.
The service has been customized for the Indian market with playlists that feature local music, including those popular in regional languages like Malayalam and Tamil, The Indian Express noted. It also has 14 localized radio stations and deals with leading Indian labels like Saregama, T series, Zee Music, YRF, Universal, and Sony.
Source: TechCrunch
Plus, Mercedes debuts the CLA35 and VW is giving the I.D. R a Spanish holiday.
Source: CNET