Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Slack announced yesterday that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. The company hasn’t spent a penny of the $120 million it raised just last October. When Slack raised that money, founder Stewart Butterfield said it was enough to last them 60 years. Besides creating a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool, why exactly would a company take…
Piracy is a serious issue. Live-streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat have plenty of sticky societal implications. These are two indisputable facts! Let’s not make the mistake, though, of assuming that they overlap. This week, HBO confirmed that it sent takedown notices to Periscope, the Twitter-owned emporium of bored iPhone owners showing off their cats…
Once upon a time, circa 1995, Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo were setting up the company’s first office. It was a pretty drab place, so they decided to redo the walls. Filo headed out to pick up some paint. A notoriously thrifty type—his official title is “Chief Yahoo,” but his colleagues have been…
We are living in a cultural moment in which people with the normiest of normative identities — those jealously guarding an armful of poker chips in the game of social capital — are, in some quarters, behaving as if they’re under siege. In January, Jonathan Chait took on the scourge of “political correctness” for New…
The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone. In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film—out Friday—we…
In an unlikely turn of events, Google Maps is showing Edward Snowden as residing in the White House, within “Edwards Snow Den.” No, this isn’t a sign that the whistleblower and US administration are in cahoots – it’s the result of someone cleverly changing the location of a business listing after it had gone live on Google…
If you’ve never heard of Nilay Patel then here’s what you need to know: He runs The Verge, a large, successful tech website where he last week posted a nearly 7,000-word review of the Apple Watch (for which he also shaved his forearm, for the video portion). You’d think he’d be a pretty secure man….
On 1st of April 2015, reddit experienced a phenomenon of unprecedented proportions not experienced since the infamous “Twitch Plays Pokemon”. The Button is believed to have been created by the admin /u/powerlanguage who posted 10 minutes before its unveilment on the new subreddit /r/thebutton. It is a button which sits next to a simple timer that counts down from 60…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Portfolio An iOS Lens Into Equity There is more to mobile apps than games, and Portfolio, co-founded by TechCrunch alum Ben Schaechter, wants to upend the financial application space. The company launched its iOS application three weeks ago, and has seen quick early adoption, spurred on in part with App Store love…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Send an instant message asking for something, and they’ll do the grunt work of placing your order and getting it delivered to you. That’s the idea for Uber co-founder Garret Camp‘s new startup Operator that’s still in stealth, according to sources with direct knowledge of the app.You might have heard of…