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2XU, an athletic apparel business has appointed Kevin Roberts as chief executive officer. Roberts will help develop the company With the support of 2XU’s three co-founding directors Clyde Davenport, Aidan Clarke and Jamie Hunt and minority investment partner Lazard Australia Private Equity.

PRESS RELEASE

2XU, the leader in high performance athletic apparel, is thrilled to announce the appointment of Kevin Roberts as Chief Executive Officer. With 20 years invaluable experience in the sporting goods and retail industries, Roberts brings a wealth of knowledge to 2XU, ideally placing him to spearhead the brand’s rapid expansion.
“2XU represents the pursuit of an incredible global business opportunity,” said Roberts. “I greatly value the entrepreneurial culture of the brand and will continue to foster it moving forward.”
As Chief Executive Officer, Roberts will further build on the 2XU tenets laid down at the company’s founding in 2005 — engineering innovative performance products distinctly more technical and intelligent in design against their competitors in the global sports apparel industry.
With the support of 2XU’s three Co-Founding Directors Clyde Davenport, Aidan Clarke and Jamie Hunt, together with minority investment partner Lazard Australia Private Equity, Roberts is poised to take 2XU from an emerging player to a serious force to be reckoned with.
“We are delighted to welcome Kevin to our team,” said 2XU Co-Founder and Chairman, Clyde Davenport. “With Kevin’s years of building brands and business performance, we now have a cohesive management team in place committed to keeping 2XU focused on growth.”
After an early career rising through the ranks in retail and wholesale sales including roles at Asics and Nestle, Roberts joined rugby apparel brand Canterbury, and lead it back to profitability as General Manager in the early 2000s. At age 30, Roberts was appointed Managing Director of Adidas Australia. Roberts ultimately rose to the position of Senior Vice President within Adidas’ Sports Performance Division and was responsible for 9 billion dollars in global revenue.
“Kevin shares our beliefs,” remarked Clarke. “He is eager to lead the charge in making 2XU the billion dollar company that it can and will be in the long term.”
According to Roberts, 2XU’s overarching philosophy of “human performance multiplied” strongly resonates throughout his personal ethos — passion for the pursuit of excellence in sport, business and life.
“Not many people can say they lead a team that creates products to enhance athletic performance and the general health of everyone from weekend warriors to elite athletes,” said Roberts. “I’m lucky enough to make this a career.”
With a Degree in Commerce and a Graduate Diploma of Management, Roberts is also a Graduate of International Company Directors Course and the Australian Institute of Sport. Roberts has the know-how to successfully lead a dynamic, forward-thinking brand.
2XU.COM
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While the internet of things is invading people’s homes, the manufacturing and industrial world has seen the promise of connected sensors and big data for years. IBM has been actively pulling together the pieces for that “industrial internet” with acquisitions of data analytics companies and investments in sensors to create its Smarter Cities program.

In this podcast we speak with Bernie Meyerson, a VP of innovation and IBM Fellow, about how the company is helping clients pull together data from across cities to help prevent traffic, flooding deaths and to even understand where investments in infrastructure should be made. With Miami Dade County having recently signed up as a client, it’s likely that some of us will encounter a Smarter City and IBM’s version of the internet of things in the near future.

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham

• How the internet of things can improve traffic and change the future
• The difference between privacy and anonymity in a connected society
• How connected cities and medical data can intersect to make people’s lives healthier
• The underpinning of the internet of things is data, but we’re leaving troves of it on the table because computers can’t process visual data.

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According to a report in Federal Computer Week (FCW), the CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract with Amazon Web Services to build a private cloud infrastructure. Spread over 10 years, the $600 million deal would help the CIA keep up with technologies such as big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under previous cloud efforts.

FCW states that neither Amazon or the CIA would confirm the existence of the contract, or comment on the matter. It was however hinted that the way the agency procures software will change, as well as how it uses big-data analytics. Amazon recently launched its Redshift data warehouse service in the cloud , starting in northern Virginia.  Amazon Web Services also lists a number of certifications and accreditations for its infrastructure, including:  FISMA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 1/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402, and HIPAA. The AWS GovCloud is a region designed for US Government agencies, and works with a range of system integrators and independent software vendors.

Directly supporting the Federal Cloud First strategy, the CIA would be an excellent reference case for Amazon to entice other agencies to its GovCloud service. IT decisions made by the CIA follow the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise strategy, which suggests other intelligence agencies would benefit through shared information from a private cloud created in the Amazon-CIA deal. Dave Powner, director of IT management issues at the Government Accountability Office, told FCW “he was unfamiliar with the CIA-Amazon deal, but stated it would make sense – especially given spending cuts across the board at most agencies.”

In 2011 CIA CTO Gus Hunt spoke at the AWS Gov Summit 2011 event, and listed a key technology enabler for the agency as  – “an ultra-high performance data environment that enables CIA missions to acquire, federate, and position and securely exploit huge volumes of data.”  FCW reports that last month at an event Mr. Hunt was quoted by Reuters as saying, “Think Amazon – that model really works”, regarding purchasing software services on a ‘metered’ basis.

Microsoft Office has released the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), a portable utility which can check all your installed Office applications, report on any problems, and provide links to possible solutions.

If you’ve ever tried to diagnose an Office problem yourself then you’ll know it can be difficult, just because there are so many factors to consider (Registry settings, add-ons, Office policies, installed updates and more). But OffCAT aims to help by quickly locating and highlighting any issues for you.

The process starts very simply: launch the program click “Start a scan” and choose the Office tool you’d like to check (Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word are all supported).

You then have the option to enter a “scan label”, just a name to identify this scan from any other (useful if you’ll regularly scan lots of machines). This isn’t necessary, though, so you can just click “Start scanning” and OffCAT will run some detailed checks on your setup, displaying a summary in just a few seconds. Click “View a report of this configuration scan” for the full details.

The Configuration Report opens with an “All Issues” tab which highlights anything interesting. Exactly what you’ll see here depends on your setup, but scanning Outlook on our test PC revealed that we were missing some updates, and that there was a problem opening hyperlinks. Clicking this provided a simple text explanation, along with links to view the relevant Microsoft support web page, or download a Microsoft Fixit file to resolve the issue automatically.

Sometimes you may see a “Critical Issues” tab with details on more serious problems. If the program has crashed recently, for instance, details will appear here, again with links which might help.

An “Information Items” tab lists your installed updates, with information on when each one was installed, whether it’s uninstallable, and a link to find out more.

And if you’d like to keep the report for later reference (or to compare details like installed updates with another computer, say), then you can print it, or save a copy in HTML, XML or CSV formats.

OffCAT has a few very small issues. We would like to see a single option to check your entire Office setup, for instance, rather than having to run each one individually. And the “Scanning Summary” (the list of checked items displayed immediately after each scan) won’t be useful to most people; you should at least have the option to skip that and display the full report immediately.

For the most part, though, the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool is an excellent program: portable, fast, easy enough for PC novices to use, while also providing the more in-depth information that experts need. If your copy of Office is currently misbehaving, grab a copy and find out why.

Photo Credit: Kar/Shutterstock

M-Go, the online video service that was founded by Technicolor and Dreamworks, signed a licensing agreement with Lionsgate to get access the studio’s catalog. The deal includes all previous seasons of Mad Men, as well as next-day access to new episodes as the show gets back on the air next month.

M-Go customers will also be able to rent and buy Lionsgate movies like the Hunger Games, the Twilight series and the Madea movies. All in all, Lionsgate’s catalog consists of 15,000 movies and TV show episodes, and the deal will eventually bring that entire collection to M-Go.

M-Go’s CEO John Batter told me during a call Wednesday that M-Go currently has 10,000 titles available, and that the company plans to add between 1000 and 2000 additional titles every month.

M-Go launched its public beta at CES in January. Check out my interview with Technicolor CEO Fred Rose about the service below:

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Cloudera’s Hadoop implementation just got a big boost through a strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems, one of Europe’s biggest IT services companies. This would appear to be one of the first results of Cloudera’s freshly-funded international enterprise push.

The two companies are touting analytics-as-a-service using Cloudera Enterprise RTQ, featuring the Impala SQL query engine, on top of T-Systems’ existing cloud computing infrastructure. The package is available immediately for T-Systems’ European customers, while those outside Europe will get access in due course.

“Our customers don’t want to have to worry about the hardware and software for big data,” claimed T-Systems BI and big data chief Christian Wirth in a statement. “They don’t want technology, just a reliable service. We can offer precisely this — which is what makes our new offer with Cloudera so special.”

T-Systems counts big names such as Volkswagen and Royal Dutch Shell among its customers, so this is a significant deal for Cloudera. Cloudera’s is the go-to Hadoop distribution right now, but its position may not be unassailable: EMC’s GreenPlum division recently revamped its distribution by fusing it with its own analytics database, and even Intel now has a distribution out there.

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The cleantech sector has had its fare share of headline-generating crash and burn stories over the years. In 2013 alone there’s already been a couple. There was the ouster of Suntech’s former CEO and founder Shi Zhengrong in the wake of a financial scandal and the company’s subsequent bankruptcy this week. Earlier this month there was the resignation of Fisker Automotive founder and former CEO Henrik Fisker and the startup’s devaluation and attempts to sell to Chinese buyers.

Late last year there was the ouster of Better Place founder and former CEO Shai Agassi as Better Place struggled to sell cars in Israeli, saddled with losses. And no one can forget the posterchild of failing big — Solyndra — as the company’s name was drilled into American minds through the presidential campaign last year after going bankrupt in 2011, and taking taxpayer dollars down with it.

Solyndra’s Factory

As I’ve been thinking about these types of companies — that take a lot of investor money and a lot of media attention and for whatever reason flameout on an international stage — I’ve been trying to think about what characteristics these high profile failures have in common. There was a book written a few years on the habits of unsuccessful executives, which is telling. But these “big failure” stories aren’t just about not succeeding, they’re also about failing under a bright media spotlight, often times going from beloved to beleagured at a rapid clip, and along the way over promising across many levels and often times losing a lot of people’s money.

To note, Better Place and Fisker haven’t gone bankrupt, so there could be a slim chance they could succeed in some way down the road. Better Place could suddenly grow its customers; Fisker could launch a second car that becomes wildly popular. But let’s face it, these turnarounds aren’t likely. So while we’re waiting to see how they end up, these are our musings on four ways to fail as big as possible:

1). Overhyping the company or tech from the beginning: The big public fail wouldn’t be so big or so public if there wasn’t excessive media attention shining a spot light on the firm. For cleantech companies usually these proclamations are about changing the world, and making it a — pun intended — better place. It’s pretty hard to live up to the goal of fundamentally changing the world.

But tech companies across sectors do this, too. Most tech and business journalists have been to the overhyped startup launch, where you watch the spectacle and wonder what the ratio of launch cost to time on this earth will end up being.

The overhype can come from not just the media, but from investors and the community, too. Solyndra, Better Place and Fisker attracted a lot of reputable investors that aggressively courted the companies and gave them really high valuations. Outside of cleantech, app maker Color had all the makings of overhype as did Airtime.

2). The CEO ego: Sydney Finkelstein writes in his book:

“Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves. And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold. CEOs who possess this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal ambitions.”

We all know this type of CEO. Better Place, Fisker and Solyndra all seem to fall into this category. The CEO’s personal mission is intertwined with the company’s goals, and can even blind them (see my article on the problems with righteous investing).

Finkelstein also highlights how failed CEOs sometimes ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them due to their ego. I’ve heard that one specifically about Better Place (and some more successful companies, too, come to think of it). The problem with that approach is that often times it removes healthy criticism and also shows how leaders aren’t open to listening to dissenting opinions. Even if a company has the best idea, the execution can easily fail if there’s no constructive discussion of the best ways to proceed.

Finally, Finkelstein writes that failed CEOs “are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image,” but with leadership skills that can become shallow and ineffective.” He adds, “Instead of actually accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things.”

On the flip side, there’s always some element of ego in almost all CEOs of aggressive and game changing companies. But it’s when these traits overwhelm making solid business decisions that the companies get in trouble.

Workers inspecting panels in Solyndra’s factory in April

3). Lacking transparency, until it all comes out: Whether it’s full blown financial malfeasance, or just mishandling of funds, not being transparent about finances are the fastest way to contribute to a high-profile demise. Suntech Power had its own financial scandal and the company got in trouble with a fund it controlled that financed solar power plant development in Europe.

Solyndra was never found to have used political ties to get its loan, but it seemed to be less than upfront to the media, to state and the federal government, and to its employees, about its high costs and looming losses. 1,100 of Solyndra’s employees came into work one morning in August 2011 and were laid off that day.

4). Raise and lose a lot of money: It might sound obvious, but companies ultimately fail spectacularly because they raise a lot of investors money, and then lose the lot of those funds. Companies that lose several hundred thousands dollars aren’t going to be touted as a “big fail.” Small failures make up the majority of business in Silicon Valley. The big fails are hundreds of millions, if not a billion, dollars. Solyndra raised almost a billion, Fisker raised over a billion, Better Place had raised $850 million.

These types of losses have happened throughout all bubbles and busts and particularly for infrastructure companies, like the broadband buildout of the 90s, or the thin film solar investment cycle of recent years. Venture capital firms can survive being involved in maybe one of these in a fund, but not many.

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