Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Like many advertisers, Fidelity Investments wants to avoid advertising online near controversial content. The Boston-based financial-services company has a lengthy blacklist of words it considers off-limits. If one of those words is in an article’s headline, Fidelity won’t place an ad there. Its list earlier this year, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, contained more…
Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…
New York City and Northern Virginia will be the homes for Amazon.com Inc.’sAMZN +0.60% second and third headquarters, according to people familiar with the matter, ending a more than yearlong public contest that started with 238 candidates and ended with a surprise split of its so-called HQ2. The imminent announcement is expected as soon as Tuesday, according to the…
The Civil Media Co. bills itself as a solution to some pressing problems in modern journalism, pitching a new cryptocurrency that would help news consumers support quality information and weed out bad actors. So far, the effort isn’t going smoothly. Consumer demand for the new so-called token that the company is selling has been weak…
The U.S. digital ad market grew by nearly $12 billion last year, with Google and Facebook collecting 77 cents of each new dollar spent, according to eMarketer. Peter and Maria Hoey June 19, 2017 5:30 a.m. ET Facebook Inc. FB -2.59% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -0.02% Google tower so far above the rest of the…
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its dream of a fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle this week. The announcement was full of buzzwords—the modular Vision Urbanetic “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and “reduces traffic flows, relieves inner-city infrastructures and contributes to an improved quality of urban life.” Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that…
Going beyond search, the internet giant is promoting a single result over all others, and many are contentious, improbable or laughably incorrect Google handles 90% of the world’s internet searches, and it increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions. Here’s how the algorithms are—and aren’t—working Google became the world’s go-to source of information…
Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Travis Kalanick said he would seek leadership advice after a run of troubling news involving the company, capped Tuesday by an online video of him berating one of the ride-hailing service’s drivers. In a note to employees, Mr. Kalanick vowed to “grow up” and said he was “ashamed” of the…
YouTube canceled its top star’s show on Tuesday over his anti-Semitic jokes, complicating its efforts to court television advertisers while also retaining its edgy video stars. YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, distanced itself from its most popular creator—27-year-old Felix Kjellberg, who goes by PewDiePie—after The Wall Street Journal reported he made anti-Semitic jokes or showed Nazi imagery in…
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…