Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Begin: WordPress Article Content Slack, the super-slick team chat-room service, is getting popular fast. Word around the rumor mill is that it’s currently raising funds at a $2.8 billion valuation. And in the words of the late, great Biggie Smalls: Mo Money, Mo Problems. In the case of startups, success can make your databases a juicy…
I hate to break it to you, Apple executives, but you do not own the story of Steve Jobs. Even Steve Jobs didn’t own it, because there is no singular, definitive story of Steve Jobs, or anyone else. Rather, there are multiple stories, and in his case, deeply polarized takes on his managerial style, interpersonal…
At its F8 developers conference today, Facebook offered a first look at a solar-powered drone capable of beaming internet access to remote areas around the globe. Built by Ascenta, the solar-powered droner developer Facebook acquired last year for $20 million, the drone is huge. It has a wingspan larger than that of a Boeing 737…
Credit Illustration by Javier Jaén Not long ago, our blockbuster business books spoke in unison: Trust your gut. The secret to decision-making lay outside our intellects, across the aisle in our loopy right brains, with their emo melodramas and surges of intuition. Linear thinking was suddenly the royal road to ruin. Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”…
Meet your next fire extinguisher. Photo: George Mason University George Mason University engineering students Seth Robertson and Viet Tran encountered plenty of doubters when they settled on an idea for their senior project. Even the typically experimental thinkers of academia thought a fire extinguisher that puts out flames with sound waves was outrageous. And in…
Facebook, a dull and endlessly scrolling record of personal propaganda and content headlined in two or more sentences, isn’t satisfied with the way its 1.4 billion users (most non-sentient) consume the news. According to theNew York Times, it takes an epic eight secondsfor the average Joe Facebook User to load an outside news link, clicked…
Earlier this week the New York Times reported that Facebook was offering publishers a deal: With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half…
Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous. With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media…
Editor’s note: The new issue of our sister publication Nieman Reports is out and ready for you to read. I write a column for the print edition of the magazine; here’s mine from the new issue. It deals with distributed content — a very hot topic given the Facebook news of the last 24 hours…
Today in Tedium: Not many light bulbs can say that they’ve managed to survive two World Wars and then some, but the fire department in Livermore, California has managed to keep a life of its own far beyond many of the firefighters that have stayed on call over the past 114 years. The bulb, which the…