version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? Business Insider On Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg gathered a dozen executives in the eighth-floor conference room of the company's New York City headquarters. When the executives filed in, they were handed a five-page document. Goldberg sat at the head…

Reuters TV app brings innovation to the confines of a news bulletin By on 6 February, 2015 http://twitter.com/ap1pel Share Reuters believes you want to build your own newscast and be your own executive producer. That’s partly why it’s released a new iPhone app called Reuters TV , the international…

For the past several weeks, I’ve been forcing myself to get into Snapchat. I was never a fan of the one-to-one service, but I really like the concept behind Stories. It makes sense to me both why this exists and why it’s getting massive. Except for the fact that Snapchat itself is probably the…

Photographer Tanja Hollander wanted to find out what online friendships are really about, so she set out to visit all 626 of her Facebook “friends” at their homes to take formal portraits of them. The first part of How Real Are Facebook Friendships? describes the project, and then it goes into some…

Six months after buying the subscription music service Beats Music, Apple is actively working to launch a completely new paid streaming music service that will compete with Spotify and Rdio. Yet to be named, the new service is entirely Apple-designed, yet leverages Beats’ technologies and music…

Who would have thought vinyl records would become the physical music format to rule them all? Sales of records for the last nine years have continued to rise, so it’s safe to say there’s still something to vinyl. The point of vinyl, here in 2015, is comprised of two main aspects. The first is the…

Quincy Larson was just a "guy in a suit in an office" and decided he wanted to learn how to code. So he asked around. He started by picking up a bit of Ruby then found himself skimming through other languages like Scala, Clojure and Go. He learned Emacs then Vim and even the Dvorak keyboard layout.…

Overcast’s Smart Speed vs. Real Time I listen to quite a few podcasts. I currently subscribe to 49 different shows in Overcast. By no means do I listen to every episode-I treat podcasts like I treat RSS. I want to be alerted when there is something new. I then decide if I am going to spend any time…

[Photo: Flickr user Franz Ferdinand Photography ] At a time when musicians earn meager royalties from streaming services, a host of music-focused apps are making a new, largely unspoken peace offering to artists: data. The wealth of analytics offered by a host of live music apps can't be spent on…

Digg By The Numbers, 2015 Edition An Exercise In Dig(g)ital Corporate Nudity At the start of a new year, it’s tech company tradition/neurosis to do a swan dive into the previous year’s data in search of sunken treasures — patterns or insights that escaped notice in the daily rush of site metrics and…

Uber’s New BHAG: UberPool “Can you take me Higher? To a place where blind men see Can you take me Higher? To a place with golden streets” — Creed, Higher In their seminal 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies , Jim Collins and Jerry Poras coined the term BHAG (pronounced…

At the time when I was coming of age musically, when we listened to music on LPs, the listening experience was very different than it is today. For one, if you didn’t like the currently playing song you had to get out of your chair, walk over to the turntable, carefully pick up the tone arm and…

It seems like everyone today wants to build the next great scalable web app. And, at least according to Gartner , Amazon Web Services has emerged as the undisputed leading cloud provider where you should build it. But AWS can look overwhelming. There are now over 40 different AWS services, and many…

As an entrepreneur you will never stop learning. While there are plenty of articles, webinars, infographics, eBooks, etc. out there to assist with helping your startup grow, too many people are overlooking one of the most convenient types of content- podcasts. Recently, this format designed…

According to Apple's new patent , the encrypted copy contains two keys that unlock a single track: one is associated with the first user (presumably the purchaser) and a second key that can be associated with a second user. “This may encourage users to trade or copy digital content units as well as…

You gotta read this! Thoughts about reading and internet media use Back in May Mike Hudack posted a rant about the state of the news media. The gist of it is: here we are in 2014, the Internet is at scale — the mobile internet is in the pockets of 30%+ of adults worldwide and social networks are at…

Things are getting pretty strange out there. Roughly a year ago I wrote a post entitled “ This Industry Is Completely Ridiculous .” Since then, as you probably already know, our world has gotten even more surreal. If anything the ridiculousness is accelerating. It’s like the tech industry is subject…

Note: This post also published at NextView’s blog for seed stage companies The View From Seed . The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to…

I’m at the tail-end of a pretty severe audio-related midlife crisis (related: Anyone want to buy some vinyl?) and I’m convinced that the return to Vinyl and the quest for audio excellence has less to do with sound quality and more to do with nostalgia for what listening to music used to be — an…

(Image: CNET) Apple has been awarded a patent that would allow users to share music, video, and pictures directly with each other -- without having to worry about piracy. The patent, filed in 2011 and awarded earlier this month , aims to make it substantially easier for iPhone and iPad users to…

The great podcast resurgence and the rebirth of radio By on 21 January, 2015 http://www.twitter.com/matthewbuckland Share Like one of those birds that are attracted to shiny jewellery, I love new gadgets and new technology. As someone with the expensive Early Adopter Disease, I embraced podcasting…

We’ve put on our thinking caps to develop a rating methodology which helps us determine the best cabin experiences around the world. We wanted a system which put the very subjective “best” in an objective context. After much hard work, we’re proud to present our first “Best Economy Long-Haul…

[Photo: Zero Creatives , Getty Images] One afternoon in 2004, Mikel Ellcessor walked into his boss’s office with a big idea. At the time, he was the head of local content for New York public radio station WNYC. It was making all sorts of interesting shows, but connecting them with the right audience…

Pandora’s Personalized Pushes If you’re a Pandora user, you may have recently received a timely and curiously relevant notification from them. Sure, you’ve seen notifications from Pandora at Halloween (Monster Mash Radio anyone?) or Christmas (Get in the holiday spirit!). After the first of the…

Climbing The Wrong Hill I know a brilliant young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. He has decided he hates Wall Street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). He recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony show…

Why Instagram Worked A co-founder looks back at how a stalled project turned into a historic success A few of the first ‘Instagrammed’ images by Mike Krieger, 2010. Earlier this month we marked four years since Instagram launched. Throughout the day, I glanced at what time it was, and thought back…

Broken cap tables We see a lot of cap tables at eShares . For every new company we onboard we clean up the table and verify it against the legal documentation. These days we onboard about 100 cap tables each month. I want to share the four things we learned in the last year that surprised us most.…

The Future of Cinema Roughly 1.26 billion movie tickets were purchased in North America between January 1 and December 31 of last year, according to preliminary estimates by The Hollywood Reporter . That sounds like great news, a massive number. It is not. That’s the lowest attendance since 1995.…