Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of…
America’s cities all have the same dream these days: to be the next Silicon Valley. To court Big Tech, they have taken to showering some of the world’s most profitable companies with taxpayers’ cash. On the surface the rationale seems obvious. Manufacturing is so 20th century: ship in the tech bros Just 12% of engineering…
Tesla Inc.’s engineering chief won’t return from his leave of absence, a person familiar with the situation said, as the auto maker heads into a pivotal period to prove it can sustain production of the Model 3 sedan. Doug Field, who had been senior vice president of engineering, stepped away from his work overseeing product…
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein My first job as a product manager was in games. I worked at Playdom, Zynga’s primary competitor during the social gaming boom of 2009. The sophistication of our data analysis techniques and the platform supporting them played a…
Mobile screens are likely to stay small, but the share of ads they are taking on is becoming immense. In fewer than five years, nearly seven out of every 10 digital ad dollars will go to mobile, according to a fresh forecast from Forrester. That’s thanks to what the research firm is predicting will be…
The tweet was an obvious troll, by a fake doctor with a profane name. “When Trump supporters come to my office at the Mayo Clinic, I love misdiagnosing their healthy pregnancies as ectopic so they have to abort their white fetuses,” Twitter user @DrNifkin wrote last week. Since then, the Mayo Clinic has debunked the…
Photo by Paula Mariel Salischiker For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch fell flat: by and large, people were skeptical of the efficacy of targeted advertising; the ads we got…
Back in March, Science Magazine published a somewhat shocking op-ed titled “Why I don’t use Instagram for science outreach.” Just from the title, it was clear that this opinion piece was positioned in opposition to something or someone. You don’t have to read very far into it to see exactly who it was targeting: Samantha…
Quartz, the business and tech news organization owned by Atlantic Media, is moving to a new home after publicly listed Japanese business Uzabase acquired it in a deal worth up to $110 million. The deal is expected to close within a month. Quartz said it won’t be making layoffs and it will maintain its brand and existing editorial leadership team. Co-president and…
Siding against Charter, a New York appeals court ruled Thursday that the state attorney general can pursue claims that the company’s broadband ads duped consumers. The ruling upholds a decision issued earlier this year by New York County Supreme Court Justice Peter Sherwood, who ruled that the Federal Communications Commission’s regulations about broadband didn’t override…