Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Native advertising and “content discovery” platform Taboola has an ambitious plan to help people discover even more content, specifically “news.” The company, which is best known for enabling brands to scale native advertising across the open Web, has struck a deal to operate a news feed app on people’s phones. “It’s like Apple News,” boasts…
Their romance began on a server at a San Francisco startup. Anna Wood had submitted a profile to the League, a dating app aimed at young professionals. She was the perfect prospect: Degree from a top university? Check. Management-track job at a marquee company? Check. Carefully selected profile pictures and a winning smile? Check and check….
Snapchat takes its secrecy seriously. Very, very seriously. Take the case of one former Snapchat employee. On his first day, he was forced to sit through an ominous orientation in which he was threatened with termination if he so much as breathed a word of what he was working on to friends or family. He…
Illustration: Jim Cooke/GMG For years, Uber systemically scraped data from competing ride-hailing companies all over the world, harvesting information about their technology, drivers, and executives. Uber gathered information from these firms using automated collection systems that ran constantly, amassing millions of records, and sometimes conducted physical surveillance to complement its data collection. Uber’s scraping efforts…
When you consider react-text: 249 the nagging privacy risks of online advertising, you may find comfort in the thought of a vast, abstract company like Pepsi or Nike viewing you as just one data point among millions. What, after all, do you have to hide from Pepsi? And why should that corporate megalith care about…
“It’s not hard to find great women in engineering,” Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of parenting technology company Winnie, told Refinery29. “Winnie has attracted a majority-female engineering team including our head of engineering who is also a woman. It turns out when you build an inclusive environment that’s supportive of women, and parents, and has…
Flawed viewability metrics are grabbing headlines, and spurring debates among brand marketers, but a new challenge may be on the horizon for the mobile advertising industry. According to a new report released by the location-driven insights firm Placed, accuracy has fallen by the wayside in the rapidly expanding location-based advertising industry, which is estimated to…
Blast from the past, disguised as news: The Financial Times is going to have an app in Apple’s App Store. Wait! Don’t go! I’m going to (try to) make this more interesting. The reason the FT’s move qualifies as news is because the FT left the App Store back in 2011 in a dispute over Apple’s subscription rules. At…
Anyone who spends time on Instagram knows that celebrities are doing #ads, and also that there are lots of times a celebrity is clearly doing an ad but isn’t really admitting it, which is kind of shady. But there’s never been an attempt to actually find out how much #spon is out there – and…
Twitter unveiled an update to its mobile app that enables users to block ads on mobile webpages opened via the app. Unlike Google’s recently reported move to incorporate an ad blocker in its Chrome browser next year, Twitter is simply enabling its app to use the ad block software built into Apple’s native browser, Safari….