It was the best of years, it was the worst of years, it was the wokest of years, it was the most problematic of years, it was the year of AI, it was the year of scooters, it was the year of Big Tech triumph, it was the year of Big Tech scandals, it was […]
View More It’s the Jons 2018!Category: Opinion
What history could tell Mark Zuckerberg
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg obsessed over the wrong bit of history. Or else didn’t study his preferred slice of classical antiquity carefully enough, faced, as he now is, with an existential crisis of ‘fake news’ simultaneously undermining trust in his own empire and in democracy itself. A recent New Yorker profile — questioning whether the Facebook founder can fix […]
View More What history could tell Mark ZuckerbergMy product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more
‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy Xmas […]
View More My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and moreHere comes the downturn
It’s remarkable how fast the tenor of the times has changed. Only a few months ago we were in a boom that seemed like it might never end. Now the yield curve has inverted; the markets have gone bear; and Google Trends has the word “recession” at its highest level since 2009. There seems to […]
View More Here comes the downturnHow Juul made vaping viral to become worth a dirty $38 billion
A Juul is not a cigarette. It’s much easier than that. Through devilishly slick product design I’ll discuss here, the startup has massively lowered the barrier to getting hooked on nicotine. Juul has dismantled every deterrent to taking a puff. The result is both a new $38 billion valuation thanks to a $12.8 billion investment […]
View More How Juul made vaping viral to become worth a dirty $38 billionFacebook’s fact-checkers toil on
Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was confronted with its inaction in controlling disinformation, is falling apart. But in this case the reason you haven’t heard much about it isn’t because it’s […]
View More Facebook’s fact-checkers toil onThe most common forms of censorship the public doesn’t know about
Amid all the discussion today about online threats, from censorship to surveillance to cyberwar, we often spend more time on the symptoms than on the underlying chronic conditions.
View More The most common forms of censorship the public doesn’t know aboutIn the winds of crypto winter
Well, it was surreal while it lasted, by which I mean the 2017-18 cryptocurrency bubble. For a while there, Coinbase was #1 in the App Store, Bitcoin was above $10K, and there were more notional crypto zillionaires out there than you could shake a Merkle tree at. Those were the crazy days. Now, though, a […]
View More In the winds of crypto winterChanging consumer behavior is the key to unlocking billion-dollar businesses
Revolutionary products succeed when they deliver value to their users. The fact that a product creates a behavior shift is not enough. It must create value to overcome the initial skepticism.
View More Changing consumer behavior is the key to unlocking billion-dollar businessesJIRA is an antipattern
Atlassian’s JIRA began life as a bug-tracking tool. Today, though, it has become an agile planning suite, “to plan, track, and release great software.” In many organizations it has become the primary map of software projects, the hub of all development, the infamous “source of truth.” It is a truism that the map is not […]
View More JIRA is an antipattern7 things to think about voice
Voice won’t change everything but it will be part of a movement that heralds a new way to think about our relationship with devices, screens, our data and interactions.
View More 7 things to think about voiceWelcome to the stochastic age
In 1990, Kleiner Perkins rejected 99.4% of the proposals it received, while investing in 12 new companies a year. Those investees made Kleiner Perkins “the most successful financial institution in the history of the world,” boasting “returns of about 40 percent per year, compounded, for coming up on thirty years.” Nowadays, the Valley’s VC poster […]
View More Welcome to the stochastic age