May 2013
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Negotiating 101: Steve Jobs Style →
Talk about “no compromise”.
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“Sergey is Bruce Wayne, and I’m Lucius Fox.”
– Astro Teller, speaking to Brad Stone for his in-depth look into Google [x].
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Amazon to pay royalties for fan fiction →
Todd Bishop on the new “Kindle Worlds”:
The company says it will license rights to popular books, games, movies and other content to let independent authors write their own stories based on those worlds, and receive royalties from sales of their fan fiction through the company’s Kindle Store.
Seems like a smart idea. Though I have to imagine the most popular worlds, like Star Wars,...
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The Virginal Man of Steel →
Dave Itzkoff talks with director Zack Snyder about his upcoming Superman film:
What drew Mr. Snyder in as he first read the “Man of Steel” script (while Mr. Nolan and his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, waited in his driveway) was a vision of the character that felt both classical and contemporary. On the one hand, Mr. Snyder suggested that for Clark Kent to be fully fleshed out, not...
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Learning From Los Gatos →
Steven Johnson responding to a New Yorker column by George Packer:
Sure, companies went public or sold for staggering sums, but companies have been going public or selling out for generations without creating tens of thousands of millionaires along the way. The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice...
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Flickr, Vimeo integration likely baked into iOS 7 →
Nice scoop by Mark Gurman. Makes sense to me. I was always surprised that Apple didn’t move to integrate Flickr into iOS when they already did so on OS X with iPhoto. Let’s just hope this helps alleviate the photo management nightmare.
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Xbox One runs three operating systems →
Only three? They couldn’t squeeze a few more in there?
Seriously though, this part seems pretty key, as relayed by Sharif Sakr:
In terms of whether apps will be cross-compatible between the regular Windows Store and the storefront accessed by the new console, we’re told they won’t. Developers will have to do a bit of work to make a Windows app suitable for the Xbox One, not...
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First Look at Xbox One →
While everyone else was scrambling to get stories written as quickly as possible following the Xbox One unveiling, Wired’s Peter Rubin got the “exclusive” early look. And Wired’s presentation is quite nice.
I’m still not sure what to think of the new Xbox. Certainly, Microsoft did a better job presenting it to the world than Sony did a few weeks back with the...
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The best thing you'll read on Yahoo buying... →
soupsoup:
comes from employee #2, practically the co-founder: Marco Arment
Well said.
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"I Couldn't See It." →
Alexis Madrigal spoke with outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini about the time Intel talked to Apple about powering the original iPhone:
“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you...
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“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this....”
– Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at USC speaking to NYT about Apple’s overseas tax situation — or lack thereof.
One potentially good thing out of all this, Tim Cook will address it directly tomorrow in front of the Senate:
Mr. Cook is expected to emphasize that Apple is most likely “the...
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“As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We...”
– Tumblr Staff: News!
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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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