Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Inside Mattel’s headquarters just south of Los Angeles International Airport, Christine Kim grabs a shield and fires a plastic disc from it across a conference room. “I’m going to be playing with all my boys, deflecting their bullets and then be like, ‘I’m going to shoot you,’” says Kim, one of Mattel’s top toy designers and a…
Underscoring the complicated relationship between the tech world and traditional entertainment, Snapchat has done a course correction on its original content strategy, opting to shut down its Snap Channel permanently, leading to the departure of a number of employees, including Marcus Wiley, Head of Program Planning and Development. Launched in January, Snap Channel had marked Snapchat’s foray into self-generated original content. The…
Condé Nast, the publisher that owns magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, said on Tuesday that it had acquired Pitchfork Media, the company behind the independent music website and quarterly magazine, for an undisclosed sum. Pitchfork, founded in 1995, has long been one of music’s independent voices, known for unearthing up-and-coming artists, and for its…
We asked for your worst stories about working in a massive tech bureaucracy. From inept management to insane rules to meetings that lead to more meetings, you’ve been through a lot. Let’s clock in. OB1 wrote: Your company ID badge was also your attendance keeper. That’s right, if you were on a set 9-5pm schedule…
Pretend you’ve never seen a Target before. Not just Targets, but department stores in general. Now go deeper into this fantasy and pretend the fundamental tenets of capitalism and consumerism have not been established. Imagine that the world is a cold, desolate place where only your basic needs are met through cruel and unsavory methods,…
NG Converter v4.0.2.6 Exhibit 99.1 From: Jack Dorsey To: All Employees Date: October 13, 2015 Subject: A more focused Twitter Team, We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I’m going…
The new owner of the Village Voice is keen to invest in the storied New York City weekly newspaper, he told Billy Penn on the afternoon that news broke of his acquisition. Peter T. Barbey, the 57-year-old CEO of the Reading Eagle Company, said his plans are to add staff until the weekly is “as…
Twitter/@jorgecortell It went like this. At a reverse-demo event in New York last night, Jorge Cortell, the CEO of the healthcare startup Kanteron Systems, noticed a female attendee wearing shoes. He snapped a picture of the shoes. He then tweeted the picture of the shoes. This is what he said: Event supposed to be for entrepreneurs,…
Flickr/Michael Goodin The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called unicorn companies have been created every week in 2015, according to data from CB Insights. But now it looks like winter is coming to Silicon Valley. Fortune’s Dan Primack went to…
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative has gotten the stamp of approval from major publishers, including The Washington Post, Vox Media and The New York Times. But lingering questions about the initiative’s inner workings, and some latent paranoia about Google’s real motivations, have others feeling skeptical. AMP’s stated mission is to speed up the mobile Web, which…