Culture
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Home away from home: The unspoken significance of Facebook’s latest showpiece
For the last year or so, Facebook has looked vulnerable on mobile. That was not just because its main smartphone app isn’t all that good – it’s over-crowded, finicky, and a clunky translation of the desktop Web version – or that it was once clueless how to make money on mobile. It’s also because it has been made vulnerable by…
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CEO Supper Club: What company do you envy?
The last question we ask at every CEO Supper Club is always the same: On your worst day, what CEO do you envy? If you could run another company, which would it be? We got a wide range of answers at the end of our meal with various sharing economy CEOs. Leah Busque from TaskRabbit envies DogVacay or... -
Breaking the fever: Flurry further disproves the theory of app burnout
Are you sick of downloading applications? Do you tire of installing and deleting scores of free games and apps from your device? Does this gambit pay off if I’m not trying to sell a product afterwards? If you answered “yes” to any of those, congratulations — you’re in the minority. There was some debate earlier this year over whether consumers... -
CEO Supper Club: Why Airbnb has absolutely dominated the sharing economy
Perhaps it was appropriate for something as feel-good-sounding as the sharing economy, but our CEO Supper Club attendees were awfully fawning about market leader Airbnb. It’d be easy for some professional jealousy to creep in– and Lord knows, I tried to stoke those fires. After all, these recent magazine covers touting the sharing economy phenomenon really focus mostly on Airbnb….and... -
Upworthy says we’ve been doing viral all wrong: serious stuff is more shareable than LOL cats
Tonight, Upworthy will mark its first birthday with a party hosted at the New York residence of Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder and now owner of august political journal the New Republic, who is one of the media startup’s investors. The founders, Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley, will have much to celebrate. Since launching on March 26, 2012, Upworthy, which…
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“Disownership is the new normal,” Sunrun claims in light of new survey
A new online survey commissioned by home solar company Sunrun indicates that “disownership” is on the rise in America, with a majority of respondents saying they have rented, leased, or borrowed the sorts of items people traditionally own in the last two years. The Harris Interactive survey of 2,252 adults, which wasn’t based on a probability sample, found that 52…
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The New Yorker launches new tech and science vertical for its website
The New Yorker is today launching a new science and technology vertical and accompanying blog for its website, NewYorker.com. The section will feature a mix of new posts and stories from the New Yorker’s archives, while the blog, called “Elements,” will bring fresh tech and science-focused content to the site on a daily basis. The blog will include…
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The promise (and refreshingly low hype) of online education
At some point in 2011 education went from “Oh God, no!” to kinda hot in Silicon Valley. It has a lot of the ingredients the Valley loves: A controversial premise from a major Valley thinker that higher education is, for the first time in history, not worth the price of admission A few VCs being contrarian enough to start funding... -
Social media’s billion-person game of telephone is good for memes but bad for activism
My iPhone knew that my fiancée was participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s social media efforts before I did. She, like many others, had changed her Facebook profile picture to a variation of the organization’s logo — a red square with a pink equal sign — in support of the HRC’s efforts to topple the Defense of Marriage Act.... -
The sharing economy may be the first time verticals beat horizontals
All you need to see is one full tech cycle to know the company that describes itself as the, say, “Facebook but just for people who eat peanut butter,” isn’t going to make it. There are always hundreds of them — many more inane than that description, some less. Somehow they find cash. But almost none become big companies —... -
Forget about Summly – what we need is analysis
Yesterday, Cornell computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer criticized Yahoo’s acquisition of Summly, arguing that 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio’s app wasn’t impressive because it used bolt-on technology licensed from SRI. But what caught my interest about Gün Sirer’s critique was a side point about our “TL;DR culture.” (TL;DR stands for “Too long; didn’t read.”) Summly, Gün Sirer argued, was…
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For university accelerators, good intentions aren’t good enough
Today’s announcement of a new university accelerator program at the University of Southern California (USC) should have elicited celebration. The appropriate feel good PR boxes were checked with the inclusion of tier one VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KCPB) and Hollywood mega-agency United Talent Agency (UTA), each announced as partners. But underneath the delicious frosting, this cake is the... -
So Columbia Journalism School’s new dean doesn’t Tweet. So what?
In his USA Today column published yesterday, Michael Wolff pulled out his wagging finger and directed it at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for appointing longtime New Yorker reporter Steve Coll as its dean. The supposed folly? Coll has never Tweeted. Using that as the kernel of his argument, Wolff calls the new dean’s appointment “an audacious…
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The 41 hottest guys in tech
On Friday, Complex magazine stunned the world by coming up with the idea of putting photos of 41 physically attractive females in a slideshow and dressing it up as a story. And so was born “The 40 Hottest Women in Tech,” which included our fearless leader, Sarah Lacy, who’s got, like, three or four babies in her…
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All hail the archive: A secret weapon that publishers don’t even realize they have
The blog Boing Boing publishes posts at a rapid clip – often several times an hour. When you visit the site, there’s always something new for your intellect to chew on. On Facebook, we see the same priorities, with the most recent status updates always been pushed to the top of our newsfeeds. On Twitter, the high-volume, high-velocity approach is…
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Some guy on OkCupid stole my identity and all I got was this lousy blog post
For the last few days, my girlfriend has been carrying on a weird kind of affair. She has been exchanging text messages with a guy she found on OkCupid. He has shown great interest in her, sharing some of his most personal details. For instance, he has let her know that he has been in two threesomes, both MMF. He…























