Business, Spoken

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Zuckerberg Finds It's Not Easy to Tame Facebook's Growth Obsession Apr 02, 2018

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When Mark Zuckerberg isn't responding to the latest scandal engulfing his company, he's actually trying to fix Facebook: He's trying to redirect its obsession with growth---in users and in the time they spend on Facebook---to focus on whether those users have good experiences on the platform. The problem is that he'd prefer the world not know exactly how obsessed with these metrics his company was. And the world is not cooperating.

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The Next Cold War Is Here, and It's All About Data Apr 02, 2018

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The headlines about the trade wars being touched off by President Trump’s new tariffs may telegraph plenty of bombast and shots fired, but the most consequential war being waged today is a quieter sort of conflict: It’s the new Cold War over data protection.

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Why Are New York Taxi Drivers Committing Suicide? Mar 30, 2018

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It was a somber scene outside New York’s City Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Four coffins sat at the foot of the steps; one by one, taxi drivers covered them with white flowers, before assembling on the steps and shouting for the city to “stop Uber’s greed” and “stop making us slaves.” It was the second such gathering in two months, as drivers and their advocates mourned another suicide that they attribute to the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.

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Why Porn on the Blockchain Won't Doom Bitcoin Mar 30, 2018

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Last week the internet jumped on a new research paper proclaiming that the bitcoin blockchain contains child pornography. The authors of that paper conclude that if you’re one of the thousands of people running a full copy of the bitcoin software, or even just a curious researcher downloading the transaction history, you’re breaking the law. Because removing any data from the blockchain destroys the functionality of the system, this legal trouble could spell doom for cryptocurrencies.

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The Case That Never Ends: Oracle Wins Latest Round vs. Google Mar 29, 2018

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Oracle's nearly eight-year legal battle with Google just won't end. Tuesday a federal appeals court ruled that Google violated Oracle's copyrights when it built a custom version of the Java platform for its Android operating system. The court sent the case back to a district court to decide how much Google should pay Oracle. But Google can appeal to the Supreme Court. And it should, because the decision will affect not just Google and Oracle, but the entire software industry.

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It's Going to Be A While Till We Find 'The Next Steve Jobs' Mar 29, 2018

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In 1933, Thupten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, died at the age of 57. According to Tibetan Buddhist doctrine, the spirit of a departed Dalai Lama chooses the next body into which he will be reincarnated. So when a group of elders noticed that Gyatso’s head had pivoted from facing south to facing northeast during the embalming process, they took it as an omen. A search party left Lhasa for the northeastern province of Amdo, where they found a 2-year-old boy named Lhamo Thondup.

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This Startup Makes Augmented Reality Social—and Ubiquitous Mar 28, 2018

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At age 25, Anjney Midha has a stronger resume than some people twice his age. Before graduating from Stanford, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He led the firm’s investment in Magic Leap, the mysterious and much-hyped augmented reality company. Then he ditched venture capital to pursue a dream that had followed him from a technology-free young adulthood on a bird sanctuary in India, to the hyper-connected streets of Singapore, to his days at Stanford.

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Companies Are Cashing in on Reality TV for Tots Mar 28, 2018

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A grinning 4-year-old boy clambers up and down an inflatable backyard water park, collecting oversize Easter eggs, goaded from behind the camera by his mom. The boy, Ryan, stomps the eggs open and unveils plastic toys. It looks like a home movie, but it’s actually the most-watched video on one of the most-watched YouTube channels in the world, Ryan ToysReview. It has been viewed more than 1.1 billion times since 2016, and the leaders of a new startup, Pocket.

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No, a $38 Water Bottle Can't Turn You Into a #Brave #Boss Mar 27, 2018

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See this fancy pink water bottle I’m holding? Now watch as I bash my head in with it. This is not, I assume, what the makers of the $38 “beauty essential” intended. What they promised was “glamour sipping like a boss.” They wanted me to “be brave.

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This Brooklyn Architect Wants to Rewire Puerto Rico with Solar Mar 27, 2018

Show notes

The sixth-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s grinding-up of Puerto Rico brought what might feel like good news. According to AEE, the Electrical Energy Authority, almost 93 percent of Puerto Ricans—1,365,065 people—now have power. The process has been agonizing—a misguided early repair contract to the unlikely Whitefish Energy for $300 million got cancelled, and it took months for crews from better-suited firms to get started.

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