Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat wants to bring focus to Mountain View. Can the moonshot factory adapt? Photographer: Justin Fantl for Bloomberg Businessweek Earlier this year, Astro Teller, a ponytailed scientist and science fiction writer, gave a TED Talk. It was a first for Teller, but not for X, or Google X, as the research lab…
Having Blackbox ship your stuff to customers is cheaper than doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op of indie artists. If everyone pays for postage, warehouse space, and packaging themselves, the cost is very high. But if we all pool our resources, we’re as big as any company purchasing at volume. This gives us…
An app to locate rentable driveways for parking. An app to locate rentable yachts. An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.” An app that guides mindful meditation. An app that imparts wisdom. And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings. We are overloaded daily with…
Snapchat is working on a crucial part of its growing digital ad business: an application programming interface (API) that would let partners start buying ads with more precision and frequency, according to multiple sources. The messaging platform reached out to ad technology companies and agencies about its API, asking them what they would need from such software,…
Reed Hastings got it right. It just took longer than he thought. “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours,” the Netflix CEO told his investors in a…
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…
March 30, 2016 8:00 a.m. ET Genius, the music-lyric storehouse and budding Web annotation platform, has accumulated millions of visitors and a stockpile of venture capital cash. Now the company is preparing for its next step in startup maturation: building an advertising business. To that end, the company has hired Ronen Shapiro as its first…
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…
By now you’ve probably heard the story of Tay, Microsoft’s social AI experiment that went from “friendly millennial girl” to genocidal misogynist in less than a day. While Tay promised to learn from her interactions with people online, Microsoft apparently hasn’t learned anything from the countless headlines about how Twitter users like to talk to…
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…