Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
With its annual Salesforce Connections conference right around the corner, the industry’s leading CRM outfit Salesforce decided to give attendees something to talk about. Last week, the company forked out $15.7 billion to acquire data-visualization company Tableau in a move that comes on the heels of similar mergers in the cloud computing space. The marketing…
Facebook has just announced the full details of its Libra cryptocurrency venture, including details of the founder members of the Libra Association, among them Visa, Mastercard, Uber and Spotify. Its mission, it says, is to make payments cheaper and more accessible. Whether we can trust them about that is another matter. Libra could be a social-good venture…
Google is the dominant player in online advertising, one reason the U.S. Justice Department is laying the groundwork for potential antitrust action against the tech giant. It has a 37% share of the $130 billion U.S. digital ad market, according to research firm eMarketer, but understanding Google’s full clout requires a deeper look at the sector. Google…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 19, 2018. On Wednesday, two representatives of the United States government held press briefings, both of them touching on one of the most astonishing news stories of the Trump presidency—a series of events that had begun two days earlier, when Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki to…
The growth virus can infect century-old corporations the same as SV startups Ranjan here, and I’d like to talk to you about Theranos. I’ve long been obsessed with this story, to the point of a borderline creepy fascination with Sunny Balwani back in 2016. John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood was one of the best books from…
A new study suggests suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press May 29, 2019 5:59 p.m. ET Are creepy advertisements really necessary to support the free web? A new academic study suggests they aren’t. Behavioral advertising,…
The Washington Post is taking a proactive approach to digital display advertising issues with a new project that is set to fix bad code, while saving brands from code errors and cross-platform bugs in ad code. The Ad Performance and Safety Protocol (APSP) focuses on accidentally harmful ad behaviors to ensure a better user experience…
For my column this week, I looked at a rather odd and disturbing trend — the financialisation of the mobile home sector in the US. Big private equity and investment funds are going long on trailer parks, it turns out, buying them up and (say activists) raising rents and threatening housing security for the most…
Here’s an argument you hear a lot: the gigantic cash burn rates at the likes of Tesla and Uber are nothing new, because today’s established tech greats also churned through tons of cash in their early years. In fact, we keep hearing from champions of these glamor stocks on business TV shows and pundits’ blogs…
Angry Birds is so 2009, you might say. “I haven’t played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist. It doesn’t matter. Angry Birds is still part of your life. As the first wildly successful mobile game, it’s an avatar for the way our understanding of what’s private and what’s personal has…