Ep 17: The 12th Man
Nasir and Matt kick off this week's episode by discussingMicrosoft partnering with Foursquare. They also talk about Texas AaM licensing use of the "12th Man" to the Seattle Seahawks, the FTC going after a mega spammer, and the backlash by developers of King.com's "candy" trademark. Nasir and Matt answer questions about legal concerns of running a virtual business, whether to have an employee handbook, and starting an LLC with your spouse. From Pasha: That website I was talking about that shows how you can mess with Nigerian scammers. Check out their trophy room with some interesting pictures of the scammers themselves. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Hi! Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: And we’re ready for our next episode. We’re actually recording on a Thursday. That’s a little unusual. We’re usually on Fridays, thanks to our audio producer going on vacation for the week or something. MATT: You know, he could just cut this out since he does all the audits. But, if he chooses to leave it in there, it should be known that he does a great job. NASIR: Except, apparently, he has, like, vacation any time he wants. MATT: That would be nice. Also, another thing, after listening to the last episode, I’m going to stop doing future predictions because, at the beginning of last episode, I said how great a Super Bowl it was, and then it turns out the Super Bowl was awful. NASIR: It was way off, but I was right. My predictions were correct. The commercials were great. There was that one car commercial with the food and funny stuff. So, yeah, I was right on the ball on that one. MATT: So, I’ll stop doing that – at least until it falls right before another big event that I’ll do the same thing again. Okay, let’s get into the first article here, and this is a pretty interesting one. It deals with a couple of pretty big companies. We have Foursquare and Microsoft. NASIR: Yeah, Foursquare, I don’t use it anymore, but I know that it’s still something that a lot of retail and restaurants still use, and you get certain benefits of checking in and all that. But this is a big deal. Foursquare’s data is awesome. They are competitors to Yelp and Google Maps in the sense that they have all this information for a ton of businesses. The problem is I don’t think Foursquare is doing as well as they were doing not too long ago, but they licensed the data to Microsoft which is a big deal for about 15 million dollars. MATT: I’m kind of surprised that one of these other bigger companies hadn’t already bought them before. I just assumed they’d already been bought up by a Google or Microsoft – something like that. It’s a little bit surprising to me. Maybe it’s just because I’ve tailed off a little bit. NASIR: Yeah, I think I recall, they may have been offered some deals in the past, but really hasn’t gone anywhere. But I just wanted to point out the difference between purchasing and licensing. This may be an obvious thing but, when you license any kind of intellectual property – whether it is information or trademark which we’re going to talk about later in the show – you still retain the ownership. And so, you’re allowing some other party some rights to that data. So, in this case, Microsoft doesn’t own that data. They can use it under the terms of the deal. I definitely know it’s not permanent. I definitely know it’s restricted on how they could use it. And so, this is a big win for Foursquare in that sense and relative to being purchased or being bought out altogether probably. MATT: It sounds like it’s better than just a straight up purchase anyway because at least now you can license it. What was the deal? 15 million, I think? NASIR: Yeah, and it includes a database of more than 60 million entries and five billion check-ins. By the way, I assumed it was the restaurants and things like that, but it’s also our user data too as well. It looks like they’re a growing database of us...
