In an experiment conducted more than thirty years ago, volunteers were presented with two bowls of different sizes. The large bowl contained ten red jelly beans mixed with 90 white jelly beans. The small bowl held just one red bean and nine white beans. If the volunteers closed their eyes and picked the red bean from one of the bowls, they’d win four dollars. The bean selection would be random...
ETH Denver was the place to be at the start of March. At least if you’re a crypto enthusiast worried about the direction of the industry. The event began with a five-person band singing a protest song. They belted out rude lyrics about Sam Bankman-Fried and Do Kwon, and promised “not to use centralized exchanges run by these toxic dudes.” It’s a far cry from the days when the crypto industry...
When Apple released iOS 14.5 in 2021, the Cupertino hardware and software company dropped a bomb on the Internet’s advertising industry. The update for iPhones and iPads included a new privacy tool. App Tracking Transparency requires app-makers who want to track activity across apps to ask their users’ permission before they can collect that data. For advertisers and marketers, that need to...
For a company that receives almost half its revenue from customers aged between 25 and 40, Starbucks has been surprisingly successful at marketing on TikTok, a platform aimed at teenagers. The coffee firm’s TikTok account has almost two million followers, more than ten million likes and is packed with clips of customers talking up their drinks and shots of baristas going the extra mile. One...
Kevin Roose won’t be leaving his wife for Sydney. The New York Times technology correspondent spent a couple of hours in mid-February chatting with Bing’s new AI feature. Over the course of the conversation, Roose reported, Bing displayed what he called “a kind of split personality.” Search Bing acted like a librarian, sourcing information, summarizing news articles and looking for deals. It...
The quarterly reports of large public companies are rarely moments of great emotional expression. The warnings of reduced profits or future headwinds are delivered in language cold enough to freeze stock prices. But when Mark Zuckerberg delivered Facebook’s fourth quarterly report in October 2021, what struck Mark Isaac, the New York Times’ technology reporter, most was the emotion the company’s...
In September 2022, Google told its senior managers they needed to spend more time in front of their screens and less time sitting in planes and relaxing in hotel bars. There would be no more team off-site events or social functions. If a virtual option was ever available for a meeting, that meeting would take place online instead of in person. Employee travel would be limited to “business...
Twenty-three years after launching his first start-up Reid Hoffman was still feeling the effects. The creation of SocialNet, a site that tried to combine social networking with dating services and a classifieds board, “was a lonely and stressful journey,” Hoffman wrote in 2020. The use of food as a stress relief, combined with the meals taken during recruitment and sales, meant that more than two...
For followers of Elon Musk, the last few months have been quite a ride. Before buying Twitter, the entrepreneur’s tweets had largely focused on his companies’ achievements. Videos showed the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, the expansion of Starlink satellite coverage and the release of new Tesla lines. Scattered between those tweets were also plenty of standard memes, the occasional crypto...
In early November, as Elon Musk allowed anyone with eight bucks to buy a blue check mark, an account called @EliLillyandCo made a dramatic announcement. The pharmaceutical company was excited to declare that insulin was now free. As one responder put it, that would be “big if true.” Eli Lilly is one of the three main suppliers of insulin, delivering the life-saving hormone to more than 8.4...
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