Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes: One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
From Facebook Reject to Purchased by Facebook for $19 Billion
Over the next nine years the pair also watched Yahoo go through multiple ups and downs. Acton invested in the dotcom boom, and lost millions in the 2000 bust. For all of his distaste for advertising now he was also deep in it back then, getting pulled in to help launch Yahoo’s important and much-delayed […]
Posted inNonfiction, Podcasts, Quotes
The Financial Power of 1,000 True Fans
If you had 1,000 people who were your true fans—and I define them as people who would buy whatever it is that you produce at any time and would not only buy the paperback but also the hard cover and the digital version, who would not only buy your CD but would drive 100 miles […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Disruption Machine
Jill Lepore’s critical look at the language of innovation in tech: Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Philip Welsh’s Simple Life
He chose a low-tech, simple life. Now his lack of a digital footprint is hampering the search for his killer. By 1 p.m., Philip would leave the small yellow house in Silver Spring where he lived alone. He walked a half-block, waited for the No. 5 bus, took it to his job as a taxi […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Trouble with IBM
A legendary American tech company faces new challenges, and new competition, in areas where it once dominated: It would have been better to walk away. As the Government Accountability Office reviewed the award, documents showed the CIA’s opinion of IBM was tepid at best. The agency had “grave” concerns about the ability of IBM technology […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Linux for Lettuce
Can lessons from the tech industry help agriculture ensure the continued vitality of our food supply? On open-source seeds and protecting biodiversity: “It’s this collective sharing of material that improves the whole crop over time,” Myers told me. “If you’re not exchanging germplasm, you’re cutting your own throat.” If all of this seems like the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
How science fiction writers inform the way we think about the real world: Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist at the Seattle-based tech company LaserMotive, who has done important practical and theoretical work on lasers, space elevators and light-sail propulsion, cheerfully acknowledges the effect science fiction has had on his life and career. “I went into astrophysics […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How a 26-Year-Old From Dallas Turned Fashion Blogging Into Big Business
Affiliate marketing is almost as old as the Internet; it developed back in 1994 thanks to pornography sites, and it was implemented by Jeff Bezos at Amazon shortly afterward. Here’s how it works: Say you search for flights on Priceline. The hyperlinked airfare results aren’t just any old links. They’re affiliate links. The act of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Secret Behind Pixar's Storytelling Process
Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other […]
