Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image: Gizmodo Pebble, one of the best-known smartwatch brands, is dead. Rumors about the company’s demise have been swirling since The Information reported a potential Fitbit buyout last week. Today in a post on Kickstarter, Pebble confirmed that Fitbit was acquiring “key Pebble assets” and that Pebble would “no longer be operating as in independent…
Now YouTube is set to pay millions in royalties to songwriters, in its latest salvo in a campaign to make amends with the music industry. The platform will pay music publishers “millions of dollars” for unpaid royalties from songs used in YouTube videos that have been difficult to identify, the company said. The agreement follows…
Alphabet’s CFO Ruth Porat wants to bring focus to Mountain View. Can the moonshot factory adapt? Photographer: Justin Fantl for Bloomberg Businessweek Earlier this year, Astro Teller, a ponytailed scientist and science fiction writer, gave a TED Talk. It was a first for Teller, but not for X, or Google X, as the research lab…
Anyone familiar with Team Pebble knows full well: keeping quiet isn’t our style. We love sharing Pebble’s story with you—whether it’s a new product, fresh feature, or simply staying in touch online and in person. Aside from announcing Pebble’s 4.3 software updates, our silence over the past month was deafening and out-of-character—we’re sorry for that….
The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy. On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed,…
Photo: Adrian Ramirez/Getty Images/EyeEm It would be almost rude to close out the year without another flare-up regarding the exchange of human remains on Tumblr, the premier social network and microblogging service for the discussion and exchange of human remains. Last year, it was “Boneghazi,” in which a self-styled witch admitted to, apparently, collecting bone…
For over two and a half years, Jake Beckman has been waging a war against clickbait. The flashy headlines peppered with teasers and exclamations tend to obscure the legitimacy of an article, rendering it into nothing more than a question and answer, a latent pique of curiosity that sometimes never manifests further than a headline….
A few years ago, the software start-up GitHub faced an uncomfortable truth: It could be a pretty unpleasant place. It was 2014 and the company was growing rapidly as a hub for programmers to collaborate on coding projects. But as its user base grew, so too did its problems. A GitHub developer, Julie Ann Horvath,…
British scientist Prof. Stephen Hawking gives his ‘The Origin of the Universe’ lecture to a packed hall December 14, 2006 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Hawking suffers from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrigs disease), which has rendered him quadriplegic, and is able to speak only via a computerized voice synthesizer…
ComScore gave its investors a pre-Thanksgiving turkey Wednesday evening in the form of another disclosure about improperly recorded revenue. In a filing buried after the market closed ahead of the holiday, the media-measurement company said it would need to adjust the accounting treatment for some past monetary transactions, primarily because of errors related to timing of revenue recognition….