Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
What is it Like to Wake Up and Have the Press Ready to Torpedo Your Business? In case you missed it, the press yesterday ran several stories questioning the viability of a wireless charging company I invested in called uBeam. Obviously my day turned out very differently than I had anticipated when I woke up,…
According to the high-profile consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., millennials will have to work seven years longer or save twice as much in order to live as well in retirement as their parents. But take heart millennials! The following video should make you feel better (if you have a little adventure in your soul as…
It’s difficult to imagine that there was a time, not long ago, when advertising was said to be “dead.” In 2004, research company Forrester & Co, proclaimed that we had reached “the end of the era of mass marketing.” In 2009, Advertising Age, said “the post-advertising age is under way.” “Advertising Is Dead,” headlined the…
The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing I’ve been slightly obsessed about pricing since 2010. Before joining Fluxx, I was part of the team that changed the price of The Times digital edition from this: The Times digital price pre-2010 To this: The Times digital price post-2010 Introducing what inevitably…
Rarely a day goes by where I don’t hear some politician or pundit claim that the American Dream has become unattainable for too many. It’s also a common theme in my Facebook feed. Sometimes the culprit is student debt. Sometimes it’s static wages, or the disappearance of pensions and manufacturing jobs. Sometimes it’s how predatory…
I’m a big fan of Dan Lyons, the former Newsweek senior reporter who used to write the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, and now is a comedy writer on the HBO show “Silicon Valley.” I’m looking forward to seeing him at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, promoting his…
The reasoning behind the new open source WordPress.com interface, named “Calypso,” is simple. The existing PHP codebase served the company and the WordPress community well since the company’s founding in 2003, and made a lot of sense three, five, and certainly ten years ago. But in the super-fast, mobile-first era, it had become a hindrance….
Susan Sarandon on MSNBC.MSNBC Let’s be grateful to Susan Sarandon for exposing just how vapid and callous the left-wing #NeverHillary argument is. Speaking to Chris Hayes on MSNBC on Monday night, Sarandon, a Bernie Sanders surrogate, said she was unsure if she could bring herself to vote for Hillary Clinton in a general election….
In 2013, the lyric-explanation website Rap Genius rebranded simply as “Genius,” and announced that it would try to annotate not only songs, but poems, essays, and news articles. Three years later, the startup has become a flash point in the panicked and disingenuous hustle to scrub the internet of unkindness, which has since gotten confused…
Sharing items on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Weibo can affect how well a user understands what they read, according to a new study. The finding comes after researchers from Peking University and Cornell University carried out a study on users of Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging site which is similar to Twitter. Two…