Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Farewell to Katch It’s been an amazing ride, but it’s time to say goodbye. Katch will be shutting down on May 4th, 2016. To our users — you have been incredible, inspiring, and supportive… which makes this post that much harder to write. It is with great disappointment that we’re announcing that Katch will be shutting down…
Facebook Messenger launched a pair of neat new features this week, and among those was one that’ll sound very familiar to any Snapchat user: Messenger now includes scannable codes that let you add another person as your friend. It was the latest in a long line of features that Facebook very clearly took inspiration from Snapchat…
It didn’t take a startling expose about mismanaged sexual assault claims for women to know that Uber is not the most female-friendly service in this, our sharing economy. But when BuzzFeed News got a hold of some leaked screen shots from Uber’s internal customer support interface, seeing the words “rape” and “sexual assault” appear more than 10,000…
At least my driver wasn’t drunk. As I saw headlights approaching while my driver continued in the wrong direction down a one-way street, I was already thinking of the raging ride review I was going to submit to Lyft. Almost dying in a head-on collision was definitely the worst part of the Lyft ride I took Saturday…
On Mar. 31, Nintendo’s first mobile app, a strange question-and-answer social network called Miitomo, launched in the US. It’s been available in Japan for a few weeks, and according to Nintendo, it was downloaded over 1 million times in the first three days there. Nintendo, which pretty much single-handedly created the portable video-game industry with…
When news of Peeple, the so-called “Yelp for people” that lets you rate anyone you know like a restaurant, swept the web last year, I was horrified. A tool that lets my abusive ex-boyfriend write whatever he wants about me and post it for the Internet to see? A tool that lets anyone with my…
Up to 30 percent of the current employees in the banking industry may lose their jobs to new technologies in the next 10 years, according to new projections from Citigroup. A 112-page report, “Digital Disruption,” released on Wednesday, said that the number of employees at American banks would drop to 1.8 million people in the…
Soundcloud just introduced a $1o per month streaming music service called Go ($13 if you sign up through the iOS app), which adds only two new features to the existing offering: the ability to listen ad-free and download music for listening offline. Is it dead in the water? Oy Soundcloud. Soundcloud has been struggling over…
As San Francisco’s housing shortage gets worse, there’s increasing pressure on tenants living in rent-controlled apartments to vacate so their landlords can start charging a market rate in the rapidly gentrifying city. This pressure often comes in the form of a buyout. Three years ago, for instance, a single mother with kids paid $1,600 per month for…
Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used…