Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Pandora is the grandaddy of streaming music, with more than 15 years in business and more monthly listeners using it to hear tunes than anyone save for YouTube. But Pandora, a public company, has struggled to turn a profit, and has seen its user growth slow in recent years. Today it announced that it is acquiring “several…
This hasn’t been a good week for Snapchat. News that the startup got a 25% markdown from a big investor dominated the first half of the week. And on Friday, Snapchat released a new version of its app that makes people pay to keep using certain “Lenses,” a special type of photo filter. When users…
Anne Frank’s diary is one of the most powerful historical texts of the 20th Century. It documents the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe in a way that is both incredibly detailed and (rare for such pieces) easy for children to relate to. So, if there’s one text that deserves to be freely available to all of…
Wikimedia Commons Last week, when Google’s head of news, Richard Gringras, introduced Accelerate Mobile Pages, the company’s new open-source project aimed at making the Web faster, he said its main objectives were to create a “deal-less environment” that’s “about making sure the World Wide Web is not the World Wide Wait.” The new model could…
On a bright day in the flats of San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, the busiest restaurant around is a Panda Express tucked into a shopping center dominated by a Walmart. Running a fast-food operation isn’t like other restaurants — here, we dive into the big picture, the tiny systems, and the daily struggles of…
New Line Cinema/youTubeOrcs.Albert Edwards has central banks in his sights again. Societe Generale’s bearish strategist wrote a note to clients Thursday going back to what he calls, “my favorite pastime — kicking the Fed.” This time Edwards said that the Fed and other central banks have waited too long to raise interest rates, allowing companies to…
Updated Nov. 11, 2015 7:31 p.m. ET Facebook FB -0.44 % is experimenting with new advertising approaches for its Instant Articles platform after publishers encountered challenges generating ad revenue because of restrictions imposed by the social network. Instant Articles, which Facebook rolled out to all iPhone users last month, allows media companies to publish content…
Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us?…
Europe’s central bankers used to dismiss core inflation, a measure of price gains that excludes food and energy, as a fixation of economists who don’t eat or drive. But less so now. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi singled it out on Thursday, saying it’s “somewhat weakened.” Mark Carney last week said the gauge is important to watch…
In past eras, a father would monumentalize his love for his daughter with an exotic menagerie, or some sort of obelisk. Today, our elites create money-losing startups for their beloved kids. Ken Lerer is among the most influential people in the digital media business. He co-founded The Huffington Post, and helped facilitate its massive sale…