Former eBay Exec Chris Payne Is A Match For New Tinder CEO

(GNN) - After an announcement months ago that Tinder founder Sean Rad would be stepping out of the CEO role and into a more presidential position, the decision has finally been made on a new CEO for the growing dating app.

Christopher Payne, most recently head of eBay North America and formerly of Microsoft and Amazon, will be taking over as CEO.

“I’ve been looking for a partner for a long time now,” said Rad. “There are a bunch of things that I’m incredibly good at, and there’s a lot of things that I want to defer to someone else. I’m focused on product and marketing. Chris respects product as the center of everything, but his experience will be instrumental in dealing with operations and helping us rapidly scale.”

Rad will continue on as a board member, cofounder, and as Tinder president. Operationally, Rad will report to Payne as CEO, while still having a strategic voice as member of the board, alongside Matt Cohler, Sam Yagan and Greg Blatt.

Payne will take over operations of the company, while Rad will lead product and marketing.

“I’m so impressed with what Sean and the team have built,” said Payne. “I’ve been in tech for 24 years and I think Tinder is the single most exciting innovation in social, mobile, and local all rolled into one. I’ve spent my career at companies that are aspiring to change the world through software, and that’s what Tinder really is.”

The leadership changes, enforced by IAC, were the source of some discord when they were first made clear to Rad in November. Sources told Forbes that Rad’s removal from the CEO role boiled down to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Tinder marketing exec Whitney Wolfe that led to the ousting of co-founder Justin Mateen and was later settled out of court.

With optics damaged by the lawsuit, publicly traded IAC (which owns a controlling stake in Tinder) likely felt that a seasoned executive, with experience at publicly traded companies, might be a safer bet than Rad in a CEO role.

That said, the job doesn’t come without a fair amount of scrutiny. But Payne says he’s ready.

“I’ve made my career out of taking big jobs,” said Payne. “This is what I sought out because I want this type of impact, and I’m honored to lead something as special as Tinder. It’s a phenomenal opportunity and job and I feel that I’m prepared for it.”

Payne started his career out at Amazon, where he built out the Electronics and DVD departments under Bezos. He then shifted his services to MSN Search at Microsoft, with much of what he built carrying over into the Bing era. Payne then moved on to eBay after his startup Positronics (which dealt with machine learning and big data) was acquired by the online e-commerce giant. Re/Code reports that Payne was in the running for the CEO position at PayPal before joining Tinder.

Tinder recently launched a premium tier of the service called Tinder Plus, which introduces features like Rewind (letting users go back on their last left swipe) and Passport (letting users search for matches in any location). Tinder Plus is priced based on age, with users under 30 paying around $10/month, and users over 30 paying around $20/month, depending on geography.

Beyond that, Tinder Plus also introduced a new right swipe limiter, which the company says is meant to encourage better behavior among users who endlessly swipe right without even looking at their matches, just to see who liked them back. It also fights bots and other misuses of the app, but is more aimed at “maintaining the value of a match,” Rad said in an interview last week.

Ontario oil-train wrecks ignite worry over Canada crude flammability

(GNN) - Two recent oil-train derailments in Canada have opened a new front on the debate over safety, highlighting how even shipments of Alberta's oil sands crude can contain components just as volatile as North Dakota's Bakken.

Although Canada is best known for producing viscous bitumen that is not prone to ignite on its own, it is often blended with as much as one-third super-light oil - known as condensate - before it is shipped in rail cars, injecting the same kind of volatile gases that can explode in derailments, industry experts say.

In the case of two fiery incidents in northern Ontario in recent weeks, the oil involved was synthetic crude from the Alberta oil sands, which is upgraded from raw bitumen, making it less stable.

Both Canadian National Railway trains were heading to a Valero Energy Corp's refinery in Quebec before they came off the tracks and burst into flames.

Ever since the Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec, where a runaway train carrying Bakken crude erupted in a fireball in 2013, killing 47 people, worries about safety have been largely centered around light crude. In particular, Bakken has been the focus since its so-called "light ends," volatile gases with higher vapor pressure and low flashpoints, occur naturally.

But light ends are also present in the condensate used to dilute raw bitumen and some heavy crude. Even though the concentration in diluted bitumen, known as dilbit, is far less than in Bakken, the low flashpoint remains.

"Basically all the materials we are talking about - Bakken, West Texas Intermediate, some of the diluted bitumen blends coming out of Alberta - all have light boiling components that are flammable," said Dennis Sutton, executive director of the Crude Oil Quality Association.

(See related graphic on oil by rail incidents: here)

BUT DOES IT BURN

For Canada, the issue is not only the point at which diluted or synthetic oil sands crude might ignite, known as the flash point, but whether it would continue to burn once ignited, potentially setting off a series of blasts in adjacent tank cars.

Bakken crude is naturally rich in light ends so its flash point and fire point are roughly the same, says Andre Lemieux, secretary of the Canadian Crude Quality Testing Association (CCQTA), meaning if it ignites it will continue to burn.

However, the same is not necessarily true for crude being produced in and shipped from Alberta.

To complicate matters, there is no such thing as a typical Canadian crude. Different grades have different properties with light sweet crude streams tending to have lower flash points than undiluted heavy grades.

The concentration of light ends in dilbit vary depending on the quantity and quality of condensate added. Some shippers use semi-refined synthetic crude instead of condensate, to make a product called "synbit".

Synthetic crude presents a different challenge because as an upgraded product its flash and fire points may be quite different from crude oil.

One of the safer substances to transport by rail is raw bitumen from the oil sands, which in its undiluted state is the consistency of peanut butter and extremely difficult to ignite.

However, raw bitumen shipments require coiled and heated rail cars and additional infrastructure at rail loading and off-loading terminals, which not all shippers have access to.

Industry bodies including CCQTA and Transport Canada are now studying the flammability of various types of crude, and their results may have implications for how certain kinds of oil is shipped and how emergency services deal with crude train derailments.

Progress is likely to be slow, however. Researchers are developing new testing methods, since the existing United Nations methods for classifying dangerous goods transported by rail were originally developed for natural gas liquids like ethane and propane rather than mixed cargoes like crude oil.

"Ultimately the specific properties of crude oil and types of crude oil will become much more important as it relates to how material is transported," the CCQTA's Lemieux said. "But it will take a while."

(Reuters)(Editing by Jonathan Leff and Diane Craft)

Big ancient land-dwelling croc inspired 'abject terror'

(GNN) - The "Carolina butcher" has been found and is just as scary as the name suggests.

Scientists on Thursday said they had unearthed fossils in North Carolina of a big land-dwelling croc that lived about 231 million years ago, walked on its hind legs and was a top land predator right before the first dinosaurs appeared.

Transported back to the Triassic Period, what would a person experience upon encountering this agile, roughly 9-foot-long (about 3 meter-long), 5-foot-tall (about 1.5 meter-tall) beast with a long skull and blade-like teeth?

"Abject terror," said North Carolina State University paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, who led the research published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"Climb up the nearest tree," advised North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences paleontologist Vince Schneider.

The creature is named Carnufex carolinensis, meaning "Carolina butcher," for its menacing features. It was a very early member of the croc lineage and was unlike today's crocs. It was not aquatic and not a quadruped, instead prowling on two legs in the warm equatorial region that North Carolina was at the time.

It lived alongside armored plant-eating reptiles known as aetosaurs, early mammal relatives and other fierce predators such as the large, long-snouted, water-dwelling, four-legged phytosaurs.

Carnufex is one of the most primitive members of the broad category of reptiles called crocodylomorphs, encompassing the various forms of crocs that have appeared on Earth.

"As one of the earliest and oldest crocodylomorphs, Carnufex was a far cry from living crocodiles. It was an agile, terrestrial predator that hunted on land," Zanno said. "Carnufex predates the group that living crocodiles belong to."

The scientists unearthed portions of Carnufex's skull, spine and forelimb parts from a Chatham County quarry. Then also created a three-dimensional model of the skull, filling in the missing parts with the more complete skulls of close relatives.

Carnufex lived just before the appearance of the first dinosaurs, which started as modest creatures in the Triassic before becoming Earth's dominant land animals. Zanno said Carnufex's discovery underscores the notion that before dinosaurs became well established in North America, such crocs and their cousins filled the large predator roles.

While the dinosaur lineage eventually produced the world's largest terrestrial predators, it was the crocs and their cousins that typically were the Triassic tough guys. A group related to crocs called rauisuchians included large four-legged land predators up to 25 feet (about 8 meters) in length or more.

(Reuters)(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Square Buys Kili Technology For Payment Hardware; HQ To Become Toronto Office

(GNN) - Mobile payments and retail tech company Square has acquired Kili Technology, a Toronto-based startup specializing in silicon, electronic and software design for improvement payment processing.

The newly-acquired company will remain in Toronto, which will now act as a second Canadian office for Square, which had previously opened its country HQ in Waterloo, home of one of the most-respected engineering schools in North America.

Kili is made up of a team of payment industry veterans, including co-founder’s Greg Wolfond (who founded his first financial software company in 1983 and exited to IBM in 1995) and Afshin Rezayee (whose previous experience includes secure electronics design at SecureKey and other companies). The company produces custom system-on-chips aimed at providing FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) level security with embedded NFC transmission features, which is perfect for in-store terminal deployment purposes in retail operations.

It also holds a variety of patents and intellectual property rights regarding related tech, creates firmware for payment hardware OEMs, and has created reference designs for software, firmware, applications and other mobile point-of-sale technologies.

The acquisition brings some top-notch hardware and technical security chops to Square’s team, which could help expand its offerings in terms of merchant-side infrastructure for supporting mobile payments, and Kili brings expertise in EMV tech as well.

PlayStation Network Suffers DDOS Attack, Hackers Claim To Have Grounded SOE President’s Plane

#GNN Tech - #PlayStation Network is currently experiencing mass outages for North American users, and the reason behind the downtime is a DDOS attack for which hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility.

Sony says there haven’t been any personal details leaked in the attack, but the rolling outage persists in various locales, some ten hours or more after the attack began.

What’s unusual about this attack is that it also includes a security threat against the plane in which Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley was traveling today.

The plane was diverted to Phoenix and is currently having its cargo inspected, following claims on Twitter posted by the Lizard Squad group that claimed the same flight had explosives on board.

Of course, it’s still possible the plane was diverted for another reason and the claim by Lizard Squad is just a coincidence, but it would be a very convenient one given the timing on all the parts involved in this convoluted story. Suffice it to say, this isn’t your typical DDOS attack. We’ll provide more information if any becomes available.

Sankaty to buy JPMorgan debt portfolio for $1 billion: FT

#GNN - Bain Capital's credit arm, Sankaty Advisors, is buying the debt portfolio of JPMorgan's principal investment group for more than $1 billion, the Financial Times reported.

Sankaty won an auction for JPMorgan Chase & Co's Global Special Opportunities Group portfolio, which contains junior loans in North America and Europe as well as securities in Asia and Australia, the newspaper said. (on.ft.com/1AnRNHZ)

The deal is set to be announced on Monday, FT said.

Sankaty, which has $24 billion under management, is likely to hire many of the JPMorgan employees who built the portfolio, the report said.

(GNN,Reuters,AIP)(Reporting by Supriya Kurane in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)

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#China's Guangdong province removes over 850 'naked #officials' from their posts

#GNN - More than 850 government workers in China's southern province of Guangdong have been forced out of their jobs as part of an anti-crackdown on officials whose spouses and children have emigrated abroad.

An investigation by the provincial government identified 2,190 "naked officials" and 866 of them have been removed from their posts, according to a report posted on the Guangdong government's official news portal on Friday and carried in local media on Saturday.

State media have reported that so-called naked officials will not be considered for promotion, as they are viewed as flight risks whose ability to escape overseas could make them more inclined to engage in acts of corruption.

Xinhua said naked officials were a serious problem in Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong. Guangdong province has traditionally seen high levels of emigration with communities of people originally from it scattered throughout Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia and North America.

Many officials have been taking advantage of a Hong Kong investment scheme to squirrel away more than $1 million each, which includes buying "residency" in faraway African nations, as the scheme is not open to mainland Chinese residents.

President Xi Jinping last year launched a crackdown on pervasive corruption over concern about public resentment towards China's stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party. But the drive is also seen as a tool to remove Xi's opponents and replace them with his allies.

(Reporting by Kazunori Takada; Editing by Richard Borsuk)

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