Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
BuzzFeed has named Lee Brown chief revenue officer. Brown was most recently head of global sales for Tumblr. Prior to joining Tumblr, Brown served as senior VP of national sales for Groupon. “Bringing over two decades of sales experience and leadership to BuzzFeed, Lee will be responsible for driving business globally with new and existing revenue…
Twenty years ago, real estate agents were the first to embrace the Internet as an advertising medium. Now, it appears, they’re the first to discover its saturation point. This year, if our forecast is correct, agents and brokers will cut digital advertising by 2%. If that occurs, they’d be the first and only business category…
SEOUL—A South Korean court on Thursday sentenced the eldest daughter of Korean Air Lines Co. ’s chairman to one year in prison after finding her guilty of disrupting a flight in a case that has rekindled anger over the behavior of families that control South Korea’s big conglomerates. Cho Hyun-ah was found guilty of violating aviation laws…
Hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson used his American Express card for three decades to buy groceries, trips to Europe and just about everything else. A few months ago, he switched. “I charge a lot of money on my credit card,” said Tilson, 48, who manages more than $83 million at Kase Capital Management in New York….
This weekend, a man wearing a skull mask posted a video on YouTube outlining his plans to murder me. I know his real name. I documented it and sent it to law enforcement, praying something is finally done. I have received these death threats and 43 others in the last five months. This experience is the basis of a Law & Order episode…
1. The Washington Post For regaining its strength (with a little help from Jeff Bezos). When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for just $250 million, it wasn’t clear whether the tech maven could breathe new life into a 140-year-old print newspaper. But nearly two years later, The Post is thriving….
Women using Uber just can’t catch a break—even if they’re behind the wheel. An unsettling new BuzzFeed report discovered that some predatory Uber riders are abusing the company’s lost-and-found system to track down and harass female drivers after their rides have ended. As BuzzFeed reports, the Twilio contact numbers generated by Uber’s lost-and-found system are supposed to expire shortly after a ride,…
On Tuesday, iSIGHT Partners and Invincea disclosed an attack on Forbes.com, assumed to be the work of actors from China conducting an espionage campaign. But the way the disclosure was handled, including a sensational news cycle and required registration for actual details, makes it look as if both vendors are using the incident to increase…
Birchbox and Story: Two retail stores redefining the shopping experience The traditional brick-and-mortar store isn’t what it used to be. So what is it becoming? In the traditional sense, retail stores maintain an almost simplistic purpose: a physical space where shoppers can enter, locate what they need, pay for it, and go on their merry…
Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress content management platform is one of the most influential pieces of software on the Internet, running more than 19 percent of websites (including VentureBeat). But before Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was on the path to being a billion-dollar company, Mullenweg was simply an eager coder with a healthy attitude for self-experimentation….