The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model
The Next Brainiacs
This is the story of the most fearless entrepreneur ever: the human brain.
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn’t even have an optical zoom. But it was small, inexpensive, and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn’t introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
At times it has occurred to people that the problems with craigslist could be solved by appealing to its eponym, Craig Newmark. Newmark is under lots of pressure these days.
Speechless: Dilbert Creator’s Struggle to Regain His Voice
The rules dictated when and where Scott Adams, the chief engineer of the Dilbert comic empire, was allowed to speak. He could neither control them nor predict exactly when they’d go into effect. All he knew was that he’d woken up one morning and found that his voice had turned against him, imposing a set of bizarre restrictions.
Billions Registered
Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin’ corporate name as your own Internet address.
The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics
Veronica Noone has joined the legion of people, from Olympic-level athletes to ordinary folks just hoping to lower their blood pressure, who are plugging into a data-driven revolution. And it goes way beyond Nike+. Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.
And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov’t Info Online
The Obama administration’s most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. On Vivek Kundra and Data.gov