May 2013
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The Day Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion →
Allison Fass reporting on Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW this year where he recounted the time in 2006 that Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook:
His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually...
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Microsoft blues →
Speaking of blues… “Schumpeter” of The Economist has this to say about Microsoft and Windows 8:
This is why Windows 8’s poor performance matters. It was an attempt to solve the innovator’s dilemma by creating an operating system and a user interface for both PCs and mobiles. Mr Ballmer hoped that consumers would want to move effortlessly from PCs to tablets to smartphones—and...
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Black and Brown Blues →
Great post by Chuck Klosterman on my hometown team, the Cleveland Browns. My favorite excerpts:
How do you appease a fan base that is both highly critical and eternally infatuated? It’s like dating a woman who hates you so much she will never break up with you, even if you burn down the house every single autumn.
And:
This is the central dichotomy of Cleveland football: No other fan...
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Project Snow Fall →
Om Malik arguing that the New York Times should fight the scrappy news upstarts not by playing their game, but by rising above:
Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is their stock in...
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Building A Faster Horse →
Farhad Manjoo on the new Square Stand:
Translation: Credit cards will be here for a good long time. This isn’t a novel admission; Dorsey has always said that he doesn’t think plastic will go away anytime soon. But the launch of the Square Stand—a device engineered to improve the credit card experience—shows how deeply Square is betting on credit cards. It’s as if, after building the Model T,...
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Tesla Is a Little Bit Apple, a Little Bit Google →
Farhad Manjoo:
None of this means that Tesla should abandon its goal of building the world’s best electric cars. By competing on service, style, and the dependability of its vehicles, it can sell a lot of cars while also letting rivals use its core technology. But to be a great tech company, it’s no longer enough to just make great products. You’ve also got to let others build stuff on top of...
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“I have a secret project which adds four hours every day to the 24 hours we have....”
– Sundar Pichai, speaking to Steven Levy about his new role managing both Chrome and Android.
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“It’s about moments in life that are great but don’t last. They don’t go on, but...”
– Sofia Coppola on Lost In Translation
(via stoweboyd)
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Emotional Stickers →
Shaunacy Ferro on the making of Facebook’s stickers:
Yet Keltner thought that by incorporating some of the principles from Darwin’s seminal work on emotion, he could add a touch of the richness he felt existing emoticons lacked. “I’m naïve about emoticons because I’ve never sent one in my life, but I’ve looked at them—it’s just missing a lot of important things in our...
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24: Live Another Day Coming In Summer 2014 →
I was a huge fan of 24 back in the day. The first season was the first television show I “binge watched” on DVD while in college. I think I watched all 24 episodes in four days…
So I’m glad it’s coming back. And I’m actually happy that it’s not going to be a feature-length film. 24’s hook was the real-time aspect played over a long season. I would...
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Apple, Google Pressed by N.Y. Over Handheld Device... →
Hard to tell which is dumber: the article or New York’s Attorney General.
It sure sounds like he’s not going to be happy until every smartphone is a remote detonation device. And if that happened, he’d probably sue the companies for making weapons of mass destruction.
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You Can Do Too Much Due Diligence →
Fred Wilson:
So what did I learn from this lesson? First, trust your gut. I was using Feedburner and knew it was a very useful service. I felt that others would see that too. They did, but it took some time. Second, I learned that a service can get traction with the little guys and in time, the big guys will come along. I have seen that happen quite a bit since then. And finally, I learned that...
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Pay-TV Sector Posts Worst Subscriber Trends in... →
Todd Spangler on the most recent cable television numbers:
Q1 is historically one of the strongest periods for pay TV providers. But the 176,000 net adds in the most recent quarter came in at less than half the totals for the sector in the previous three years, according to Bazinet’s calculations. The industry added 403,000 in the first quarter of 2012; 483,000 in Q1 2011; and 507,000 in...
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Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown →
Michael Deacon:
“Hello agent John, it’s client Dan,” commented the pecunious scribbler. “I’m worried about new book Inferno. I think critics are going to say it’s badly written.”
The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn’t sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment’s thought. “Who cares what the stupid critics...
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The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink →
Vijith Assar:
Since <blink> won’t blink in Blink, Firefox would be the only remaining browser that allows text to actually flash using the <blink> element. In the messy world of Internet technology, where the browsers often can’t even agree about the size at which to draw a simple box, that is as clear a signal as one can reasonably hope for: perhaps it’s time to retire...
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“Golly, I’ll go with Bruce Seldon. I didn’t even hit him; I think the...”
– Mike Tyson, when asked who he views as a real-life version of the Glass Joe character from the 1987 NES game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! — number three on ESPN’s best sports video games of all time.
I used to play it with the Power Glove.
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"It’s a romance novel name." →
Great profile of Reed Hastings by Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg Businessweek. Three standouts:
The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage space. (In comparison, Facebook uses about 1.5 petabytes to store about 10 billion photos.) Hollywood studios used to send individual films and shows to Netflix on a disc or thumb drive; now they use a...
