Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When you buy a product like Philips Hue’s smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that’s true for those who directly author a product’s software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through “open-source” projects on…
Steve Jobs wanted to put a ding in the universe. Today, Apple wants to ding your pocketbook. Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino last month.CreditCreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg The Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s spendy new campus in Cupertino, Calif., is a majestic temple to pomp. An ethereal…
Image wrap box Free blurb with Takeaway Last fall, on a flight back from China, Evan Spiegel decided to remake Snapchat. Inspired by apps he’d seen in that country, Mr. Spiegel wanted to create a new version separating users’ friends’ content from the professional media. Each category would be sorted by an algorithm rather than…
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein My first job as a product manager was in games. I worked at Playdom, Zynga’s primary competitor during the social gaming boom of 2009. The sophistication of our data analysis techniques and the platform supporting them played a…
You’re half-way through a gaming session and the world is breaking apart around you as you run from attacking aliens. Firing as you go, you turn a corner and suddenly your view is filled with the sight of a brand new sedan. You see a cute dog at your local coffee shop. When you lean…
Facebook embraced sound-on autoplay videos, just months before Google and Apple said they were banning these formats on their platforms as unacceptable UX intrusions. By Tony Haile on June 27, 2017 6:30 am Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won’t drive its growth for the next…
After years of trading physical dollars for digital dimes, the music industry is finally seeing a payoff. Subscriptions to streaming music services jumped about 50 percent in 2016, topping 92 million. For the first time since the heyday of CDs, revenue for the largest record labels is consistently rising. But things don’t look as bright…
The solution for Post-it Notes lost under the desk and phone alerts silenced in meetings may be at hand. People who have tried and given up countless online calendars and list-making apps are making the Bullet Journal—a way of organizing and writing lists in a plain old notebook—a hit. The journal helps organize everything from…
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of…
Silicon Valley’s push into the physical world “is going to be a much longer, slower process, especially in the next couple of chapters,” said Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies technology’s impact on society. That timeline isn’t typical for Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the search engine—then called BackRub—in…