Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Women have been tracking their menstrual cycles since at least the time of Saint Augustine, and yet when Apple introduced its much ballyhooed smartwatch and Health app in 2014, there was one glaring omission: a period tracker. The fact that it took Apple three months longer than it takes a woman to gestate a human…
Peer-to-peer, short-term housing platform Airbnb is probably my favorite consumer web company. A traveling member since 2011, my wife SACM and I have been hosting travelers too for most of the last year. I’m a proud and happy user. Yet I know that some of the loudest news about Airbnb in its last couple years of mainstream…
Photo Travis Kalanick, chief executive of Uber, which views the Middle East as an increasingly important overseas market. Credit Ioulex SAN FRANCISCO — In its quest to build a global empire, Uber has turned to the Middle East for its biggest infusion of cash from a single investor. Uber said on Wednesday that it had…
The biggest near term threat to the stability of nations might not be climate change, terrorism, or nuclear war. It just might be robots—putting millions of people out of jobs. Where will they all go? There are only a few possibilities. The widespread automation of jobs—millions and millions of jobs—is not a sci-fi theory, or…
In its relentless pursuit for growth, Uber needs new drivers, and many of those drivers need cars. To help them get started, Uber has been offering short-term leases since July through a wholly owned Delaware-based subsidiary called Xchange Leasing, LLC. It partners with auto dealerships, advertises to drivers, manages risk, and even pays repo men to chase…
After discussing Peter Thiel’s almost decade-long war on Gawker with many of my close friends and colleagues, I have decided to publicly post my views. But before I do so, let me get the elephant into the room. I am conflicted up the wazoo. Peter and I disagree on many topics political, social and economic. …
May 26, 2016 7:04 p.m. ET Facebook FB -0.70 % is shutting down its LiveRail programmatic video ad exchange business, according to people familiar, effectively closing the last remaining part of the ad technology company that the social network acquired in 2014. LiveRail provided a set of tools that media companies like Hulu and A&E…
‘; if (google_ads[0].bidtype == ‘CPC’) { /* insert this snippet for each ad call */ google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); } } google_ad_client = ‘ca-pub-0457527031304647’; google_ad_output = ‘js’; google_max_num_ads = ‘1’; google_ad_type = ‘text’; google_feedback = ‘on’; google_skip = google_adnum; google_ad_channel = ‘1102379497’;This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had…
Photo Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal. It was revealed this week that he had bankrolled the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media. Credit Robyn Twomey SAN FRANCISCO — After the news that one of Silicon Valley’s stars secretly funded a lawsuit to bring down a gossip site, the overwhelming response in the…
On Monday, The New York Times published a report that Gawker founder Nick Denton believed it was highly likely that the lawsuit brought against his company by Hulk Hogan was being financed by a secret backer. Then, on Tuesday night, Forbes reported that Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has been the man secretly bankrolling the Hulkster’s…