Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
We started There Is Only R over the summer as our in-house publication about all things VR/AR/MR. (“There is no VR/AR/MR, there is only R”.) It has multiple functions for us: it allows us to talk to innovators in the industry, it helps us educate ourselves about what’s happening, it provides us with a platform to express…
Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, spent five years building Medium into one of the slickest publishing platforms on the web. Yet he found himself in traditional-publishing purgatory on Wednesday, cutting 50 employees and searching for a new business model. There could be no better proof that delivery methods matter little and content is king….
A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance believes it will increase productivity by 30%…
An ex-Snapchat employee says the company is misleading investors to drive up its IPO and he was fired for being a whistleblower, according to a heavily redacted complaint filed Wednesday in L.A. County Superior Court. Anthony Pompliano says “the avarice of the small group of executives at the helm” of Snapchat and his refusal…
How “safe harbor” turned into a protector of privilege. For Airbnb, suing American cities had become something of a monthly ritual. It started in late June 2016 with a federal lawsuit against San Francisco, the company’s hometown, over an ordinance meant to crack down on illegal short-term apartment rentals. About a month later, Airbnb sued the…
People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions? Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case….
After years of trading physical dollars for digital dimes, the music industry is finally seeing a payoff. Subscriptions to streaming music services jumped about 50 percent in 2016, topping 92 million. For the first time since the heyday of CDs, revenue for the largest record labels is consistently rising. But things don’t look as bright…
The Ferrari F355 is a beautiful car, and for those of you with exotic dreams but modest means you can have one in your driveway for as little as $60,000. But depending on the condition, you may need a hefty savings account just to keep it on the road, as these fellows just found out…
GTM DataLayer Umbel End Umbel [if lte IE 9]>< ![endif][if gte IE 10]>< ![endif] Google Tag Manager Container End Google Tag Manager Container Tony Haile’s new project is still in the planning stages. But it’s interesting. Phonograph End Phonograph Source: News Corp, the New York Times and Axel Springer are backing Scroll, a subscription service...