Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The new owner of the Village Voice is keen to invest in the storied New York City weekly newspaper, he told Billy Penn on the afternoon that news broke of his acquisition. Peter T. Barbey, the 57-year-old CEO of the Reading Eagle Company, said his plans are to add staff until the weekly is “as…
Twitter/@jorgecortell It went like this. At a reverse-demo event in New York last night, Jorge Cortell, the CEO of the healthcare startup Kanteron Systems, noticed a female attendee wearing shoes. He snapped a picture of the shoes. He then tweeted the picture of the shoes. This is what he said: Event supposed to be for entrepreneurs,…
Flickr/Michael Goodin The number of private tech companies valued at $1 billion or more has surged so much this year that on average 1.3 so-called unicorn companies have been created every week in 2015, according to data from CB Insights. But now it looks like winter is coming to Silicon Valley. Fortune’s Dan Primack went to…
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative has gotten the stamp of approval from major publishers, including The Washington Post, Vox Media and The New York Times. But lingering questions about the initiative’s inner workings, and some latent paranoia about Google’s real motivations, have others feeling skeptical. AMP’s stated mission is to speed up the mobile Web, which…
Google unveiled its new plan to speed up the mobile web today — Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP — and it’s the latest attempt by a technology company to deal with the problem of the slow mobile web. Facebook has its Instant Articles to make certain news stories load more quickly in an app; Apple…
This morning Google revealed it’s working on an open source initiative for mobile web that would deliver articles to readers instantly. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Projects is designed to avoid slow browser load times, so stories can be accessed quickly from within mobile web browsers. Rumors started percolating about the project last month. The project’s Github page…
Right, the townhouse a developer paid two holdout tenants $25 million to leave. (Google Maps) Two tenants who refused to move out of their apartment in a 10th Avenue townhouse in Manhattan hit pay dirt last year when developer Tishman Speyer agreed to pay them $25 million to scram. The pair, Gary Schwedock, 58,…
Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker In June 2013, less than a year after he sold his photo-sharing startup to Facebook for $1 billion, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom stood onstage at a press event at company headquarters, his 6-foot-5 frame partially obstructing the oversized screen behind him. He paced slowly as he spoke, stealing the occasional…
The evolution of the mobile ad ecosystem is ushering in some new disguises. I spoke recently with several practitioners about where mobile ads are heading. “The customer experience [of mobile ads] is totally broken,” Joe Prusz, ad tech firm Rubicon Project’s head of mobile, told me, referring to both web and in-app ads. He pointed…
REFORM ADVERTISING …before it is too late Advertising is broken and we in journalism and media must take responsibility for reinventing it — because advertisers and their agencies will not and because our very survival depends upon it. The moral of the story of adblockers’ success is that the public has taken charge of its next industry — advertising….