February 2014
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Sell the news, give away the olds
We decided this year to zero-base all our subscriptions to print publications. The reasoning: since most pubs give the best deals to new or slow-to-return readers, wait to see how far down they push the price, and in the meantime see if we actually miss them. So far we’ve re-subscribed to Consumer Reports. That’s it. Continue reading
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Facebook + WhatsApp means it’s time to double down on new investments
Over on the ProjectVRM blog I make a long-form case for why Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19 billion dollars in cash and stock is a Good Thing for VRM. Here I’ll make the case for why it should uncork a fresh wave of investment in start-ups and innovation at already-ups. Payments are headed to mobile, for real. WhatsApp has already expanded from text Continue reading
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Short Attention Spasm Theater
This post is a hat tip toward Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, which I learned about from Clay Shirky during a digressive conversation about the subscription economy (the paid one, not the one Rusty and other free spirits operate in), and how lately I’m tending not to renew mine after they run out, thanks to my wife’s rational Continue reading
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Weekend Linkings
Photography Stephen Lewis in Bubkes: A Tale of Urban Expansion: Late-19th-Century “Çarʂı” Row Houses, Functional Integration, Street-Life, and Class Mobility. ” The downtown end of Pirotska eventually was lined with European-style apartment houses. At the Üç Bunar end of Pirotska an older form of architecture still dominates: Two-to-three-story row-houses built in çarʂı (Turkish for ‘arcade’ and Continue reading
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You can’t sled on slush
I grew up on Woodland Avenue in Maywood, New Jersey, a few miles west of where I am now in New York City. The street was unremarkable, except when it snowed. Then the town would often block it off, so kids could sled on it. It wasn’t a big hill — just an ideal one Continue reading
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A call for personal tool making at the Legal Hackathon
— is happening this weekend in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. Read all about it here, here and here. I’ll be there to help start things off, at 10am tomorrow. (Registration starts at 9am.) My job on the opening panel is to make a 2-3 minute statement of what I’d like to see in Continue reading
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Linkies
Funny: Reverse vigilantism sweeps London, violent crime plummets Media company lays off dozens of unskilled bloggers Audio +/vs. Video Is this thing on? Why audio never goes viral. By Stan Alcorn in Digg. Pandora faces FCC setback in bid for South Dakota FM radio station. By Jeff John Roberts in Gigaom. Radio’s answer to Spotify? Less Continue reading