Shared posts

02 Apr 19:34

Apple Ramping Up Production For Next iPhone Beginning In Q2, WSJ Reports

by Darrell Etherington
iphone5(2)

Apple is looking to start production of a new iPhone of “similar” design to the current one during the second quarter of 2013, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. The production ramp-up is designed to set the stage for a summer launch of a new flagship iPhone, the report claims, which agrees with information we’ve heard from our own sources recently.

John reported last Thursday that Apple’s manufacturing partners were preparing for a June 2013 launch of the so-called iPhone 5S, a device that retains the design of the iPhone 5 but adds better specs under the hood. This report from the WSJ, paired with analyst claims of a similar timeline for an iPhone product refresh, seem to now all be pointing to a new device in early summer. Apple holds its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference around the same time, so if we’re going to see a public event detailing the new device, that’d be when to look for it.

The WSJ report today also claims that Apple continues to work on a lower-cost iPhone, destined for a launch as early as the second half of 2013. The shell casing is said to be different from the top-end iPhone, which is what we’ve heard before, and the new report also says Apple is looking into different case colors with its less expensive design, another tidbit shared by various analysts.

While it isn’t surprising that Apple would be working on a new iPhone, the timeline for launch is a bit different from what we’d expect now that Apple has released the past couple of devices in the fall instead of the summer. Still, when you start to see multiple sources come together in agreement on information like this, it’s usually a good indication that there’s solid info behind the rumors.


02 Apr 15:42

A PR guy calls out the flacks and the hacks

by Marco Greenberg
Kevin Erb

This gets at so much of what I love about what I do - and also at what can drive me nuts about it.

publicityNo kid dreams of being a PR person. And trust me, no PR practitioner wants his kids to follow in his footsteps either.

Instead, most of us, I suspect, discover the field by accident. You graduate college, then what? Apply to graduate or law school and take on more debt? Or get a job. Then it might come down to taking that part-time barista gig or working at a PR firm. If you don’t quit within the first year, you might actually fall in love with what has long been the ugly stepchild of advertising. Or in the case of an increasing number of journalists today, fleeing to PR to seek refuge from a sinking ship.

“Don’t be over educated and under employed,” my father warned me. So I left PhD courses in political science at Columbia University after barely a semester, and, Master’s degree in hand, a knack for promoting, and a passion for writing and media, cold-called the co-founder of the then largest PR firm in the world, Burson-Marsteller. I ended up working there not once, twice, but three times, including from ’08 to ‘09 as a managing director. And while I first tinkered with tech PR during my first stint there (does anyone remember the Apple Newton or the SkyTel pager?) my crash course occurred when I opened my own shop and Danny Lewin, then a grad student, asked me to help him and his Professor Tom Leighton with their entry in the MIT 50k entrepreneurship competition. We lost, but the contest gave birth to what is now Akamai Technologies, and a year and half later one of the biggest IPOs of all time.

I got lucky during the heyday of Internet 1.0 (founders shares, most of which I didn’t sell at the right time), but soon it all came crashing down, and less than two years later Danny was the first person murdered on 9/11 fighting back terrorists on Flight 11. (The book is coming out this summer). But his influence and the initial intoxication with tech PR was enough to keep me hooked. Over the years, I’ve been hired by scores of startups, mostly venture backed but others by angels from Carlos Slim to Peter Thiel, all trying to be the next Akamai.

Enough of my history. Here’s the point, or, more like the paradox. Tech PR has never been both less important and more important than it is today.

It’s seen as a commodity business, retainers are frozen or have actually decreased, with some clients asking for success fees (kind of like going to a contingency lawyer). It has been overtaken by social, search, and Google analytics. In its insecurity, PR tries to act more like a science than the art it really is, and comes up with KPIs (key performance indicators) to prove its value and keep away the dreaded 30-day termination notice. The PR training courses (from writing to client management) at Burson are now a relic, as the bean counters, squeezing all the billable hours, have no time to educate the young generation and instead throw them straight into the fire.

Is it any wonder that 20-somethings in PR often see their role as “stalking” and “spamming” reporters, viewing themselves one level above telemarketers? Oh, yeah, I hear all about journalists complaining over Twitter and elsewhere about the idiotic pitches they get from some publicists – usually junior publicists. The bitching about the “just following up on my last voicemail message” messages. The follow-up emails about pitches they didn’t read about products they don’t care about or services that suck for companies or individuals who don’t have news worth writing about. The publicist who for $1,000 will write “a comprehensive, industry-relevant article about your business or product,” which he promises to “place” in a mass media outlet. He then emails newspaper editors with an offer to supply “fully developed stories (completed articles) that you can publish under your byline, with or without editing, at no fee.”

There’s a lot of incompetence and shady behavior in my profession. But look at journalism. You have Jayson Blair (he wrote very favorably about a client of mine and always read our pitches) and a tech press that in some quarters – I won’t mention names but they know who they are – has become one giant press release copy machine.

Here’s the thing: Many view publicists and PR people as interchangeable. They’re not. All good PR people can be publicists (pure pitching and earned media placement) but not all publicists are PR people, e.g. the ones CEOs turn to in a crisis or for help in formulating a launch strategy.

When done right, PR can be like a good editor’s pen, transforming jargon-heavy, boring technical language into a simple yet compelling story. Then, and only then, can a previously unknown company with a technology that could change the world – or at least have a shot in a crowded marketplace – attract the attention it needs to survive. Good PR doesn’t make a bad product good, but it helps a good company spread its message and a good product reach consumers, the first steps to a sustainable business.

Journalists often refer to us as “flacks,” a term some of us, like Peter Himler, purveyor of a popular PR blog called “The Flack,” wear as a badge of honor. But let me tell you about the other side of the fence, the hacks – and there are plenty of them.

These are the lazy or overworked journalists who take press releases, change a few words, slap their bylines on, and call them stories. Frankly, we “flacks” love that, and will never accuse you of plagiarism. Or the reporters you can seduce by handing them a story angle and interview subjects, so all they have to do is make a few calls or send a few brief emails and a few minutes later they can cross another post off their day’s quota.

I get how journalism as a profession has changed. Budgets are tight, and publishers are squeezing every iota of productivity out of reporters. In some case they have to post 10 pieces a day, and each one has to withstand unbearable scrutiny, ever vulnerable to being decimated by irate readers, who want nothing more than to post obscenity-laden gotchas. Or they troll Twitter, know-nothings with 37 followers who mess with journalists just for the chance to be recognized by people who appear to have more “influence” than they do.

They’re subject to the “post now-edit later maybe” syndrome. They start falling for the trivial stuff they come across on Twitter and blogs, or combing Reddit for an idea that has already ridden to the first couple of pages, just so they can be first with some inane piece of information. There’s no time for fact checking, let alone additional reporting, or any semblance of getting “both sides” of a story.

Here’s another fact. Journalists are becoming less important to PR by the day. There are so many outlets, so many different and new marketing and social channels, that we can often reach your audience without your help anymore.

No wonder there is a diaspora of journalists turning in their press passes to join PR firms. In just the last month several have become marketers – most notably Fake Steve Jobs. They have gone over “to the dark side,” as you journalists call it (others in my industry might say “seeing the light”) for better salaries and perceived job security, both of which are sorely lacking in journalism today. The workload is also more manageable, or so you think.

It’s like driving, but you’re now driving on the other side of the road, and transition to PR can be a rough ride, and what felt like an automatic transition, now feels like grinding it into gear in a stick shift being tossed from one client to the next. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of journalists make the transition, some smoothly, more who don’t make the cut. They lack the promotional gene in their DNA, and the sheer energy and authentic passion that clients want to see. While pitching your editor on a story idea was cool, pitching a company with marginal news value to a former client makes you cringe.

In business, people work with people they like, and being a good writer and investigative reporter doesn’t mean you’ll master client service. In fact, the critical thinking and cynical nature that made you a good reporter, can sometimes help, but if you bring too much with you to PR, you’ll be unable to be that rah-rah guy that clients want. What happens the first time Dan Lyons has to bite his tongue when a client wants him to promote a genuinely silly idea? I’d love to be the fly on the wall for that conversation.

Some journalists may find the grass just a shade greener on our side of the fence. Others, at a closer glance, will end up viewing it as artificial turf.

One aspect of PR I’ve always liked is the banter and give-and-take with smart reporters. It remains part of why I stay at it. More reason than ever to call it like it is for the sake of hacks and flacks alike.

[Image courtesy Jurgen Appelo]

Marco Greenberg

MarcoGreenberg Marco is president of Thunder11, an NYC communications boutique representing venture backed start-ups. Last fall he served as an adjunct professor at NYU teaching Innovations in Marketing.


02 Apr 13:49

America is watching more TV than ever before—just not on TV

by Leo Mirani

It seems like only December 2010 that Americans admitted to spending as much time on the internet as they did in front of their televisions. Less than three years later, one-third of America’s internet users—and more than 80% of the population is an internet user—say they would consider ditching TVs altogether, according to a new report by market research firm eMarketer.

153491That may not sound like a huge proportion but by next year, more than half of American internet users will be watching movies and television shows over the internet. In 2012, 106 million Americans watched TV online. By 2017, that number will 145 million, an annualized growth rate of nearly 7% year-on-year. The industry likes to refer to it as “cutting the cord.” It is an apt metaphor.

A big reason for the shift is the wealth of options for viewers. They can watch what they want to—the amount of content grows daily—and when they want it. They can watch it on their computers, tablets, phones or smart TVs. And they can pay for it in the manner that they prefer.

The business models are plentiful: some broadcasters such as HBO and Showtime are actively cannibalizing their own audiences by offering access to their content online. That makes sense; better they do it themselves than lose their viewers to other streaming services. Others offer unbundled offerings, ad-supported services or, like Netflix, monthly subscriptions.

150535That Netflix sees itself as competing with traditional broadcasters is no secret. In February, it released 13 episodes of “House of Cards,” which it bought for $100 million for two seasons. The show has been the streaming service’s biggest hit. Even before “House of Cards,” Netflix’s revenues for streaming, both in the US and abroad, rose steadily. Its DVD rental business shrunk every quarter in 2012.

The latest figures do not imply the death of television. When you count TV audiences on all devices, American TV viewing is at an all-time high. But Americans are watching it via the internet more than ever.


02 Apr 11:05

Killing Cool mobile app helps ad creatives help other creatives get over the death of their ideas

by CB
Screen shot 2013-03-27 at 6.30.16 PM.jpgWorking in the creative industry is frustrating. Creatives see their ideas killed by clients and account for the dumbest reasons. Killing Cool is a community where creatives help other creatives get over the death of their ideas.

How it works: When a meeting starts, open the Killing Cool site on your phone to discreetly tally and tweet about ideas getting killed. The counters on the site record the activity and when milestones are hit, giveaways from creatives are unlocked to help with the healing.

VIEW THE CONCEPT Screen shot 2013-03-27 at 8.49.00 PM.jpgScreen shot 2013-03-27 at 8.48.04 PM.jpg Screen shot 2013-03-27 at 8.48.16 PM.jpg Screen shot 2013-03-27 at 8.48.27 PM.jpg Screen shot 2013-03-27 at 8.48.37 PM.jpg


Comments (0)
02 Apr 03:03

22 Mysterious & Abandoned Places Around The World

by Alex Wain
Kevin Erb

Incredible collection.

If you ever wanted to have an adventure off the beaten track, away from the tourists and off into the wilderness, you could do a lot worse than explore these 22 rather mysterious and abandoned locations.

We’ve previously taken you to Asia’s forgotten wonderland, but today we’re expanding our search to all four corners of the globe to bring you some of the most beautiful, magical and even spooky sites which both time and history seem to have forgotten.

1. Abandoned mill from 1866 in Sorrento, Italy

22 Mysteriously Abandoned Places Around The World
Via: i.imgur.com

2. Częstochowa, Poland’s abandoned train depot

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 2
Via: nedhardy.com

3. The Maunsell Sea Forts in England

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 3
Via: fivelightsdown.squarespace.com

4. Kolmanskop in the Namib Desert

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 4
Via: photography.nationalgeographic.com

5. Abandoned city of Keelung, Taiwan

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 5
Source: flickr.com  /  via: i.imgur.com

6. Cooling tower of an abandoned power plant

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 6
Via: i.imgur.com

7. Sunken & frozen yacht in Antarctica

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 7
Via: ruschili.35photo.ru

8. Hafodunos Hall in Llangernyw, North Wales

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 8
Via: deviantart.com

9. The remains of the Pegasus in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 9
Via: panoramio.com

10. Abandoned Blade Mill, France

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 10
Source: blessingmartin

11. Lawndale Theater in Chicago

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 11
Via: ebow.org

12. Nara Dreamland in Japan

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 12
Via: steampunkopera.files.wordpress.com

13. Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, England

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 13
Via: commons.wikimedia.org

14. The Tunnel of Love in Ukraine

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 14
Via: placesmustseen.com

15.  Angkor Wat in Cambodia

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 15
Via: theglobalpanorama.com

16.  Kalavantin Durg near Panvel, India

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 16
Via: natureknights.net

17. El Hotel del Salto in Colombia

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 17
Via: alveart

18.  15th century monastery in the Black Forest in Germany

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 18
Via: abandonedography.com

19. Fishing hut on a lake in Germany

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 19
Via: onebigphoto.com

20. Caco, Italy

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 20
Via i.imgur.com

21. Holland Island in the Chesapeake Bay

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 21
Via: baldeaglebluff

22.  House of the Bulgarian Communist Party

Magical & Mysterious Abandoned Places In The World 22
Image by 
Dimitar Kilkoff / Getty Images

Via Buzzfeed

ENJOYED IT? SHARE IT!

02 Apr 03:00

21 Awesome Stickers Designs For Your MacBook

by Alex Wain

Your laptop is a gateway to a world of limitless ideas, possibilities and basically anything your imagination (or browsing history) can conjure up. So why confine your creativity to just the screen? Why not customize your laptop and make it stand out from the crowd?

That’s the thinking behind these cool MacBook vinyl stickers for your MacBook – designed add a unique twist on the famous Apple logo, whilst adding a sense of fun to proceedings. Better yet, they’re also really easy to stick on & peel off, so thankfully no need to live in fear of them ruining the casing of your sleek MacBook.

We’ve selected a wide range of designs, from the funny, to the sleek, from the iconic to the unusual and everything in between. We’ve even thrown in some zombies, Banksy art, Darth Vader & plus Homer & Bart from The Simpsons. If there was a downside to any of them, it’s that you can only use on at any time!

Do let us know which is your favorite ok? Do you use any of them already?

1.

Here's 22 Awesome Stickers  Designs For Your MacBook

2.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 2

3.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 3

4.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 4

5.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 5

6.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 6

7.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 7

8.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 8

9.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 9

10.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 10

11.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 11

12.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 12

13.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 13

14.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 14

15.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 15

16.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 16

17.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 17

18.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 18

19.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 19

20.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 20

21.

A Collection Of Awesome Stickers For Your MacBook 21

ENJOYED IT? SHARE IT!

02 Apr 02:46

Photos: What an oil spill looks like in your backyard

by Roberto A. Ferdman

Arkansas Oil Spill

Over the weekend, an ExxonMobil spill leaked thousands of barrels-worth of crude oil and forced 22 households to evacuate in Arkansas. Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said some homes “appear to have small amounts of oil on their foundations.” These photos were submitted to Arkansasmatters.com, the website of TV station KARK, which granted Quartz permission to republish.

Arkansas Oil Spill

Arkansas Oil Spill

Arkansas Oil Spill


01 Apr 13:55

The one reason a Facebook phone would make sense

by Christopher Mims
Did you know there's already an app for that?

So Facebook is reportedly about to unveil a phone, built by struggling Taiwanese handset maker HTC, that has been modified to put Facebook and its various services in the foreground. Facebook has been working on this for years.

The business case for both companies is clear, in theory. Facebook wants people to use its services more. Perhaps it even wants its Messenger service to replace normal phone calls and text messages. (In the US and UK, it can do both.) More use means more opportunities for Facebook to advertise to people. And in the long run, Facebook needs a game-changing option—like perhaps a phone—to make enough money per user in order to ever become a business that makes a significant profit. HTC, meanwhile, is doing terribly and could use a boost from a partner with as much clout as Facebook.

The problem is, no one has any idea why users would want such a device. If you have a smartphone, you probably already have Facebook on it. Facebook is the most-downloaded mobile app in the world. Even if you don’t have a smartphone, you can get access to it.

Previous phones featuring Facebook, like the HTC Salsa, didn’t do so well. HTC

But here’s something no one seems to have considered. As we’ve seen before with Facebook’s sneaky—and yet massively successful—rollout in emerging markets, through a stripped-down form of the service called Facebook Zero, the company seems willing to play the long game in order to become as powerful as Google or Apple. And insiders at Facebook say that the company’s previous tryouts with mobile apps were merely “experiments” leading up to the launch of this “Facebook phone.”

So if this phone, which appears to be a slight re-jigging of the existing Google Android operating system on a typical slab-style smartphone, is simply another “experiment” for Facebook, then what is the company testing?

A phone as Facebook’s latest attempt to lock up emerging markets

How about an all-in-one messaging platform for emerging markets? Facebook has already convinced hundreds of millions of people that the web is Facebook. The cooperation of mobile-phone carriers the world over was key to that coup.

Aside from social networking itself, tie-ups with carriers are the one area in which Facebook is way ahead of Google, which only began experimenting with offering free access to its services, via collaborations with carriers, in November 2012. Facebook has announced Facebook-for-free services via Facebook Zero in 45 countries, and the number may be larger now. Facebook has also partnered with an array of companies, outlined below, to provide equivalent service even in markets not covered by Facebook Zero.

Some of the successful experiments in connecting to emerging markets already conducted by Facebook. Quartz

As we’ve reported previously at Quartz, “Of the 10 countries with the most Facebook users, six are emerging markets, and five of them—India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Philippines—represent 217 million Facebook users.” Facebook has also taken over in Africa, and in Indonesia, as we wrote then, “Facebook is literally becoming the internet.”

What all of these regions have in common, at present, is relatively slow connection speeds for mobile data. Given the phones that HTC normally makes, which are high-end smartphones, Facebook is probably offering its “Facebook phone” first in rich countries, where networks are fast enough to support voice calls over a data connection. But some day soon, most of the mobile networks in the world will be able to support phone calls via data.

But will carriers cooperate with a company that could wipe out a large chunk of their revenues by offering voice or video calls and text messaging for free? They may be reluctant, but there’s already a growing number of services, such as Skype, Google’s Gchat and Google Hangouts, and WhatsApp, that do that anyway. As these become more popular, the carriers may morph into providers mainly of mobile internet services. A growing share of their revenues is already mobile data.

At which point Facebook, with its experience in making customized Android phones and its many deep connections with carriers in emerging markets, will be perfectly positioned to start offering customers an all-in-one text, calling and social networking experience that could make sense in a way that it doesn’t, presently, in rich countries. You know, the ones where all the Facebook phone skeptics live.

Next, read this: How Facebook’s secret invasion of emerging markets will net its next billion users


01 Apr 13:53

Why austerity budgets won’t save your economy

by Commentary
A woman sings a protest song against austerity policies in Portugal. Economics is on her side.

Austerity is in vogue. For some time now, countries in Europe have been raising taxes and cutting government spending because they are worried about their national debt. They have hit on the word austerity to describe these tax increases and government spending cuts. The US is now following suit.

But the trouble with austerity is that it is contractionary—that is, austerity tends to slow down the economy. In bad economic times, people can’t get jobs because businesses aren’t hiring, and businesses are not hiring because people aren’t spending. So in bad economic times, it adds insult to injury when the government does less spending, less hiring, and taxes more money out of the pockets of those who would otherwise spend.

The contractionary effect of austerity creates a dilemma, not only because a slower economy is painful for the people involved—that is, just about everyone—but also because tax revenue falls when the economy slows down, making it harder to rein in government debt. This dilemma has fueled a big debate.  There are four basic positions:

1.     Arguing that austerity can actually stimulate the economy, as long as it is implemented gradually. That is the position John Cogan and John Taylor take in their Wall Street Journal op-ed, “How the House Budget Would Boost the Economy,” which I questioned in my column, “The Stanford economists are so wrong: A tighter budget won’t be accompanied by tighter monetary policy.”

2.     Arguing that debt is so terrible that austerity is necessary even if it tanks the economy. This is seldom argued in so many words, but is the implicit position of many government officials, both in Europe and the US.

3.     Arguing that the economy is in such terrible shape that we have to be willing to increase spending (and perhaps cut taxes) even if it increases the debt. This is the position taken by economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Indeed, Krugman is so intent on arguing that the government should spend more, despite the effect on the debt, that in many individual columns he appears to be denying that debt is a serious problem.  A case in point is his reply, “Another Attack of the 90% Zombie,” to my column emphasizing the dangers of Italy’s national debt, “What Paul Krugman got wrong about Italy’s economy.”  (In addition to this column, I responded on my blog.)

4.     Arguing that there are ways to stimulate the economy without running up the national debt.  This is what I also argue in my column on Krugman. For the US, the most important point is that using monetary policy to stimulate the economy does not add to the national debt and that even when interest rates are near zero, the full effectiveness of monetary policy can be restored if we are willing to make a legal distinction between paper currency and electronic money in bank accounts—treating electronic money as the real thing, and putting paper currency in a subordinate role. (See my columns, “How paper currency is holding the US recovery back” and “What the heck is happening to the US economy? How to get the recovery back on track.”) As things are now, Ben Bernanke is all too familiar with the limitation on monetary policy that comes from treating paper currency as equivalent to electronic money in bank accounts. He said in his Sept. 13, 2012 press conference:

If the fiscal cliff isn’t addressed, as I’ve said, I don’t think our tools are strong enough to offset the effects of a major fiscal shock, so we’d have to think about what to do in that contingency.

Without the limitations on monetary policy that come from our current paper currency policy, the Fed could lower interest rates enough (even into negative territory for a few quarters if necessary) to offset the effects of even major tax increases and government spending cuts.

The price of debt

Since I see a way to stimulate the economy without adding to the national debt—and even in the face of measures to rein in the national debt—I face no temptation to downplay the costs of high levels of national debt. What are those costs? The most obvious cost of high levels of national debt is that at some point, lenders start worrying about whether a country can ever pay back its debts and raise the interest rates they charge. (This all works through the bond market, giving rise to James Carville’s famous quip: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”) One can disagree with their judgment, but lenders are showing no signs of doubting the ability of the US government to pay its debts. But there can be costs to debt even if no one ever doubts that the US government can pay it back.

To understand the other costs of debt, think of an individual going into debt. There are many appropriate reasons to take on debt, despite the burden of paying off the debt:

  • To deal with an emergency—such as unexpected medical expenses—when it was impossible to be prepared by saving in advance.
  • To invest in an education or tools needed for a better job.
  • To buy an affordable house or car that will provide benefits for many years.

There is one more logically coherent reason to take on debt—logically coherent but seldom seen in the real world:

  • To be able to say with contentment and satisfaction in one’s impoverished old age, “What fun I had when I was young!”

In theory, this could happen if when young, one had a unique opportunity for a wonderful experience—an opportunity that is very rare, worth sacrificing for later on. Another way it could happen is if one simply cared more in general about what happened in one’s youth than about what happened in one’s old age.

Tax increases and government spending cuts are painful. Running up the national debt concentrates and intensifies that pain in the future. Since our budget deficits are not giving us a uniquely wonderful experience now, to justify running up debt, that debt should be either (i) necessary to avoid great pain now, or (ii) necessary to make the future better in a big enough way to make up for the extra debt burden. The idea that running up debt is the only way to stimulate an economic recovery when interest rates are near zero is exactly what I question in my previous column about Italy’s economy. If reforming the way we handle paper currency made it clear that running up the debt is not necessary to stimulate the economy, what else could justify increasing our national debt? In that case, only true investments in the future would justify more debt: things like roads, bridges, and scientific knowledge that would still be there in the future yielding benefits—benefits for which our children and we ourselves in the future will be glad to shoulder the burden of debt.

Follow Miles on Twitter at@mileskimball. His blog is supplysideliberal.com. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.


29 Mar 12:43

Dog-pampering obsessions in Singapore and Hong Kong are symptoms of a demographic time bomb

by Naomi Rovnick
Insert your own "downward facing dog" joke here.

In Hong Kong and Singapore, it is not unusual to see couples pushing baby strollers that do not contain a baby, but rather a small dog. Sometimes the puppy prams are not wheeled by the dog owners, but by a Filipino or Indonesian domestic helper who has been hired just to look after the pooch.

This extreme level of anthropomorphic dog pampering  is taking place, not surprisingly, in two cities where sky-high high real estate prices and poor parental benefits force many adults to forego what is increasingly viewed as the luxury of having children. The combination of low fertility and the worryingly high prices of homes large enough to raise actual kids —this modest 776 square foot 3-bed in a Hong Kong suburb popular with middle class families rents at $3864 a month—produces some eye-catching luxury businesses catering to canines.

In Singapore, pet owners can buy sailboat cruises and aromatherapy sessions for their companions, the Daily Telegraph reports. Hong Kong has a luxury dog hotel for animals whose owners—sorry, “parents”— cannot bear the thought of leaving them in a mere kennel. Allegedly designed in consultation with an animal psychologist, it has a beauty spa and a shop selling products with names such as “Ultrasonic Hydro Bath”. (Here is a photo gallery of its primped and coiffed guests.)

And let us not forget about the dogs’ religious and spiritual needs. At a recent pet products exhibition in Hong Kong, guests could have their animals proclaimed as Buddhists in what is known as a “gui yi” (皈依) ceremony. And in 2011, a South African yoga instructor in Hong Kong offered “dog yoga”; in Singapore they call it “doga.”

Singapore’s leaders would much rather have people fulfill their need to nurture by having more babies; the city state is facing a dangerous demographic time-bomb with a fertility rate of 1.2 births per woman. In Hong Kong, the figure is only 1.1.

One main reason: Real estate. Property prices have soared in both cities due to low global interest rates, open economies and high interest from wealthy mainland Chinese buyers. Hong Kong flats are nicknamed “shoebox homes“. And while Singapore offers its poorest citizens fantastic public housing, the government is also fighting a property bubble (paywall) that has put home ownership beyond the reach of much of the middle class. Hong Kong and Singapore policymakers also don’t do much to encourage parenthood by providing generous maternity or paternity leave, like France and Sweden.

The situation is unlikely to change anytime soon—which is why a company selling strollers that are custom-made for small dogs could be a great investment idea.


29 Mar 10:49

How visionaries see the future

by Francisco Dao

visionary_finalI just returned from the inaugural Dent conference where a session by Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith started me thinking about how true visionaries see the future. Smith explained that in 1979 — when he and his collaborator Ed Catmull started working with the Computer Graphics Group at Lucasfilm, which would eventually be spun out to Steve Jobs and become Pixar — the computing power required to do what they dreamed about wasn’t anywhere close to being a reality. They were working with tools that didn’t exist and staking their future on the faith that Moore’s law would catch up to their imagination and make it all possible.

After Smith’s talk, I kept thinking about this idea of working with tools that don’t yet exist. Technology entrepreneurs love to talk about how they’re creating the future, but the vast majority of them are working with today’s tools. This creates a limit on what they can envision and therefore a limit on what they can create. It confines them to only seeing what’s next.

But true visionaries such as Smith see the future two steps ahead instead of one. They think about what the tools of the future might look like and then imagine what they can build using these non-existent technologies. This intermediate step in their thought process allows them to dream on a scale exponentially greater than the typical entrepreneur.

Here’s an example. Imagine you’re living in the very early years of steam power. Steam technology is starting to be employed in factories but construction is still being done with hand tools. Construction with only manual labor keeps most buildings relatively small. A “regular” land developer would consider what is possible based on the hammers and nails available at the time and build accordingly. But a visionary would look at the steam driven factory and speculate that steam power would soon be used for construction equipment.

After imagining the new tools, they would then imagine what they could build using these non-existent steam shovels and cranes. Compared to what could be done with hand tools, the possibilities are so fantastic they can hardly be believed — skyscrapers, subways, and bridges that literally change the face of our cities and how we live.

In hindsight this kind of vision seems easy, but in practice it is extraordinarily difficult, because we don’t know what technologies will advance or at what rate. Moore’s law has been fairly reliable, but even then we don’t know when it will be ready for what we need it to do. Smith and Catmull were about a decade too soon. Even after Steve Jobs bought the group from Lucasfilm, Pixar struggled for years, eventually burning through half of Jobs’ fortune before Disney gave the green light to “Toy Story.” After 12 years of pioneering computer animation technology, Smith would leave Pixar before “Toy Story” and wasn’t able to take part in his vision becoming a reality.

On the Internet, countless people bet on online video and lost millions before broadband caught up to the dream in 2005. In hardware, Apple bet on tablet computing with the Newton almost 20 years before the technology was truly ready with the iPad. In non-computer related fields it’s even harder to predict what tools and advancements will become available. As Peter Thiel likes to remind us, we were promised flying cars, but transportation breakthroughs have been almost non-existent in the last 50 years. In energy, technologies we thought would come to fruition, such as solar power, have been slow to develop while hydraulic fracturing is unleashing a new era of oil production.

Envisioning the future one step ahead is already a difficult challenge, seeing two steps ahead is almost impossible. No amount of market research, lean startup customer development, or data mining will show us what will be possible two steps forward. This is the rarified realm of true visionaries, a realm with dreams that are multiple orders of magnitude beyond what most of us can comprehend. Self-proclaimed visionaries who can’t imagine anything greater than mailing things in a box need not apply.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

FB_Pic Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.


27 Mar 13:42

Facebook's New Ad Plan Is the Web's Old Plan

by Peter Kafka

Sheryl Sandberg headshot

A year ago, in the run-up to its IPO, Facebook told the ad world that it had a new plan: “Sponsored stories” — ads that looked like “real” content, that would show up on users’ screens based on the way they and their friends behaved on Facebook.

New new plan: Facebook will let advertisers buy ads on the social network the way they buy ads all over the Web — tracking users’ travels outside of Facebook, and showing them ads based on their browsing history.

Facebook took a step toward this last summer, when it rolled out its Facebook Exchange, which allowed marketers to serve “retargeted” ads on the right-hand side of users’ pages. Today they’re making a small but important change, by letting advertisers serve the same kind of ads directly in users’ main “News Feeds” — Facebook’s primo real estate.

Unless they’re really paying attention, the average user won’t notice the difference between a retargeted ad in their News Feed and Facebook’s (not very) old-fashioned “sponsored story” ads. The formats look the same, and just like the old ones, you can see if your friends “Liked” or commented on a retargeted ad.

facebook sponsored ad

The main difference is that if you click on the ad, you’ll be sent outside of Facebook to an advertiser’s site, instead of inside to a Facebook page. (You’ll also, in theory, be able to opt out from seeing that kind of ad if you notice a small “ad choices” logo” and follow a series of steps.)

The real change is all happening behind the scenes: Instead of telling an advertiser that they’re likely to find someone receptive to their message based on their Facebook behavior, Facebook is telling an advertiser they can guarantee delivery of their message to someone who has visited certain websites.

That’s a big shift in the way Facebook has treated advertising. Before last year, the site didn’t allow any retargeting at all; both internally and externally, the concept was treated with disdain.

And that made some sense: If you’re going to sell ads on Facebook the way they’re sold all over the Web, then what makes Facebook different than Yahoo, AOL or any other big site with a ton of impressions?

But advertisers — at least certain kinds of advertisers, particularly those with “direct response” pitches — love retargeting, and they’ve gone gaga for the ones Facebook started selling last year. Presumably they’ll be just as excited about these ads, which will be much more visible. And if Facebook can figure out how to serve them up on phones (much trickier, for technical reasons), they’ll be into that, too.

The question is what this means for Facebook in the long run.

The site says it isn’t backtracking or moving away from its “sponsored stories” ads in any fashion, and that this lets it have the best of both worlds: You can buy ads on Facebook the Facebook way, or the way everyone else does it.

Wall Street might well conclude that this is a good idea, too, since it should add a whole new revenue stream for the site. Or it might conclude that Facebook is less enthusiastic about a worldview it was promoting just a year ago.

Time to find out.

27 Mar 13:17

As the final holdouts cave on paywalls, it’s a big moment for content entrepreneurs

by Sarah Lacy
Kevin Erb

Great post about the future vitality and viability of content and "new" media.

May 20–November 2, 2011- Guggenheim Museum, New York

Raise your hand if you still believe that quality news should be available for free online? Okay, now keep your hand up if you actually run the business side of a news organization… Anyone? Hello?

What a weird time to be building a media company. Increasingly the “knock” on my business that I hear from larger digital-first companies is that the level of quality we produce is not possibly economically viable — indeed, that our increasing quality is actually a business negative. The logical inverse of that is that these players are actually making a business decision to embrace — nay, demand — shit quality from their teams. Seriously.

Meanwhile, the last holdouts of the old guard who cling to the mantle of quality at near insane costs are finally caving to the world of the metered paywall. Last week, The Washington Post finally — finally — gave in, and the trend appears to be spreading to the UK, where the Telegraph has just announced it’s doing the same. (For anyone who cares, so is the San Francisco Chronicle.)

More than a decade into the shakeout of media, at least there is a clear and distinct line between old and new media. What the groups on either side of that line share is a tacit admission that online ads simply don’t work when it comes to journalism, at least in the current incarnation. And, I suppose, they’re sick of trying and hoping for alternatives.

As someone with 15 years of experience on the editorial side and a scant year-plus experience on the business side of media, I find myself somewhere in the middle — as, I imagine, do other recent content upstarts like the Verge and BuzzFeed.

I refuse to accept a reality where users can’t expect and demand quality. YouTube comments aside, readers are simply not all idiots. But likewise, I don’t see why it takes a 400-person newsroom to deliver quality. And that’s really what the grudging acceptance of paywalls is about — a reluctance to make deep cuts to legacy and storied newsrooms.

So, that’s it? We’re just all out of innovation and discipline as an industry?

As important as the last decade of blogging has been; the most important 10 years for media may be the ones in front of us. Like Bryan Goldberg, I believe we’re about to see a wave of content companies being created that stand on the shoulders of the blogs and new media properties that came before. Unlike many of those that started as hobbies, many of these will be run by professionals and funded by VCs — even ones who’ve typically shied away from content in the past. Frankly the opportunity is just too big, and the incumbents are, well, just too bad.

Content companies share some commonalities with the fashionable rush to enterprise software. It’s easier to get revenues early, and once you do, a company with a good editorial team and good audience is frequently worth something to someone. The question is how long it’ll take, how much money it’ll cost, and the patience to build something large. Only a handful have cracked the $100 million range.

Similarly, the first wave of software-as-a-service companies had issues scaling and exiting. The largest software companies in the world still sell it the old fashioned way — same as with media. But like media, most assume that’s changing. Slowly, but it’s changing.

Contrast both to the waning interest in consumer Internet where many things look like they “could” be a $1 billion dollar company, but winning tends to be all or nothing, and scale has to come before revenues.

That said, Bryan’s and my companies couldn’t have more different approaches on how to get there, and both of us have differences with players like the Verge or BuzzFeed. PandoDaily has almost nothing in common business-wise with Paul Carr’s NSFWCORP. But that’s less because we all disagree — and more because there are just so many different types of media opportunities on the table right now.

We will not all win. Content is brutally hard. It’s the ultimate iterative startup where each day’s output determines your future. A brutal, brutal slog. But when you are starting now, with no baggage of the “new” or old media world, seeing clearly what’s broken in both, the opportunity is just so great.

Someone will create the next 50-year media titan. Media is too important, and in aggregate there’s too much money attached to it, even if it’s not wisely being bought or sold now. And it seems everyone else in the new or old side of the business is just throwing in the towel, crushed under the weight of their expensive newsroom or page view legacies.

It’s not that media is any more broken now than it was ten years ago, but the ramifications of just how broken it is are coming home to roost. If the old media world has settled on the metered paywall as the answer, that’s good news for digital. It’s a bandaid and an augmenter to revenues at best — even for those who have had the most success at it like the New York Times.

The expectation that you don’t have to pay for content is just too great on the Web. Even Netflix — one of the most successful subscription companies on the Internet — only has 23 million subscribers, and this after some 15 years of business in an industry as crowd-pleasing as TV and movies.

If paying anything is the future of news, news is going to be a smaller industry. And if the free world is all about aggregation and low standards? Well, there’s a big gap in the middle where someone will win and win big. It’s when these industries look the most screwed — when everyone seems to have given up — that real leaders are born.

And we couldn’t look more screwed right now. Hallelujah!

Sarah Lacy

Sarah_Lacy_6x6 Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.


26 Mar 14:23

Google's Google problem

GOOGLE is killing Google Reader. That may not matter much to many of you; use of Google Reader [a tool, by the way, for reading online content via RSS] was concentrated among a small group of relatively intense users. As it happens, that small group includes quite a lot of people who write for or as part of their living (it's the second tab I open most days, after Gmail). And so Google Reader has been mourned over, angrily at times, a bit more than the many other Google services that have come and gone with little ado.

It isn't that hard to imagine what Google was thinking when it made this decision. It's a big company, but even big companies have finite resources, and devoting those precious resources to something that isn't making money and isn't judged to have much in the way of development potential is not an attractive option. Dropping Reader isn't going to hurt the company's business, and Google may have calculated that it won't even be bad for users in the long run. Someone else will come along to provide the service and, if they give it their full attention, to improve it.

Yet this little contretemps may suggest bigger trouble ahead for Google and big changes in the offing for the internet. One immediate effect is relatively easy to anticipate. John Hempton makes a nice point here:

Google is in the process of abandoning its mission. Google's stated mission is to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. RSS is a way that a small number of us organize our information. Google no longer cares. It seems what they care about is mass-markets...

But as Ezra Klein notes, Google may face a trust issue. Translated into economese, Google has failed to consider the Lucas Critique: adoption behaviour for newly offered services will change in response to Google's observed penchant for cancelling beloved products.

Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system (which, for many of us, is truly indispensible), its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo- hosting services, and on and on and on. It hasn't done this because we're its customers, it's worth remembering. We aren't; we're the products Google sells to its customers, the advertisers. Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.

But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for "social" apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can't be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.

There may be bigger implications still, however. As I said, Google has asked us to build our lives around it, and we have responded. This response entails a powerful self-reinforcement mechanism: both providers and users of information and other services change their behaviour as a result of the availability of a Google product. You can see this on a small scale with Reader. People design their websites and content based on the assumption that others, via an RSS reader, will come across and read that content in a certain way. And readers structure their reading habits, and ultimately their mental models of what information is available and where, based on the existence of this tool. The more people used Reader, the more attractive it was to have an RSS feed and to write posts in feed-friendly ways. And the more people provided RSS content and structured online interactions around the blogs that pass through RSS, the more attractive it became to be a part of that ecosystem. If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system, you end up causing significant disruption, assuming there aren't good alternatives available.

The issue becomes a bit more salient when you think about something like search. Many of us now operate under the assumption that if we want to find something we will be able to do so quickly and easily via Google search. If I want an idea for a unique gift for someone, I can put in related search terms and feel pretty confident that I'll get back store websites and blogs and Pinterest pages and newspaper stories and pictures all providing possible matches. That in hand, I can quickly comparison shop, again via search, and order online. And if I'm a retailer, I can count on precisely the same dynamic and will structure my business accordingly.

If I'm a researcher, I know I can quickly find relevant academic papers, data, newspaper accounts, expert analysis, and who knows what else related to an enormous range of topics, and I know that whatever research product I ultimately produce will be added to this bonanza. Once we all become comfortable with that state of affairs we quickly begin optimising the physical and digital resources around us. Encyclopaedias? Antiques. Book shelves and file cabinets? Who needs them? And once we all become comfortable with that, we begin rearranging our mental architecture. We stop memorising key data points and start learning how to ask the right questions. We begin to think differently. About lots of things. We stop keeping a mental model of the physical geography of the world around us, because why bother? We can call up an incredibly detailed and accurate map of the world, complete with satellite and street-level images, whenever we want. We stop remembering who said what when about what engagement on such-and-such a date, because we have fully archived email and calendar services for all of that. And we instead devote more mental energy to figuring out how to combine the wealth of information now at our hands into interesting things. Those interesting things might be blog posts or cat GIFs or novels or theories of the universe or personal relationships. The bottom line is that the more we all participate in this world, the more we come to depend on it. The more it becomes the world.

What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world. But there isn't much to the real human world that isn't shaped by the mental activity of the people in it!

That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us. To the extent that we become worried about this phenomenon, we may go out and find back-up services or other alternatives. This will be less convenient and more costly, in terms of time and money, but those sufficiently foresighted might feel it's a better option than opening up gmail one day to read that the email service, and the 10-year's worth of communication it holds, will soon be gone.

But in the long run that's a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector. Network externalities are all fine and good to ignore so long as they mainly apply to the sharing of news and pics from a weekend trip with college friends. Once they concern large swathes of economic output and the cognitive activity of millions of people, it is difficult to keep the government out. Maybe that deterrent will be sufficient to keep Google providing its most heavily used products. But maybe not.

I find myself thinking again of the brave new world of the industrial city, when new patterns of interaction led to enormous changes in economic activity, in culture and personal behaviour, and in the way we think. We upgraded ourselves, in terms of education, hygiene, and social norms, to maximise the return to urban life. And the history of modern urbanisation is littered with examples of privately provided goods and services that became the domain of the government once everyone realised that this new life and new us couldn't work without them. I think we, meaning users of the web and the companies that provide its blood and bones, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of a world awash in information.

26 Mar 03:19

No advertisers paid the Wall Street Journal to reach Henry Blodget

by Paul Carr

blodget

I hope you’ll forgive the delay. It’s taken me a few days to process the full extent of the stupidity contained in this post by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget, in which he writes about his shock at finding a copy of the Wall Street Journal outside his hotel room door. “Look What I Found Outside My Hotel Door In The Morning — Yesterday’s News!” he snarks…

I’m not against getting free stuff, so I probably would have picked the newspaper up and taken it to breakfast if I hadn’t been in a hurry.

Alas, I was in a hurry.

So I stepped over it, refreshed the news on my phone, and headed for the elevators.

Somewhere in there, I also (briefly) contemplated the immense amount of work and money that had gone into producing and delivering that newspaper to me. The news-gathering, the writing, the editing, the laying-out, the printing, the truck delivery, the hotel employee who had to push carts around the hotel for hours in the dead of night… And that doesn’t even include the cost of growing, cutting, and pulping trees, making paper and ink, and burning coal and oil for power and electricity to run those gigantic machines. I at least hope that no advertisers paid the newspaper to reach me!

“!” indeed. And this just weeks after Henry discovered a hair on his airplane seat, prompting a 32-page slideshow.

Ok, let’s have a crack at this…

Stupidity No. 1: Blodget makes the schoolboy error of assuming that because he’s not interested in something, there’s no point in it existing. Let’s try rewording that paragraph…

I also (briefly) contemplated the immense amount of work and money that had gone into producing and delivering those bananas on the breakfast buffet. The air freight, the trucks, the fruit store, the chef to peel and chop them into little pieces… And that doesn’t even include the cost of growing the bananas, the fertilizer manufacturers, the pickers, the company that makes the little stickers on the banana peel. And for what? I don’t even like bananas! I, at least, hope that the hotel didn’t pay money for those bananas I don’t even eat!

Henry: the hotel doesn’t give a fuck whether you like bananas, or newspapers*. What matters is that lots of people do like bananas and newspapers, and the business benefits of providing them are greater than the costs. That’s the same reasons the Journal keeps printing newspapers: the overall benefits of printing newspapers still outweigh the costs. You do run a site called “Business Insider,” right?

Okay. Stupidity No. 2: Any comment that Henry Blodget (pictured top left, from the WSJ) makes on the state or value of the news business has to be considered in the context of Business Insider. That’s the site Blodget has in mind when he talks about having his finger stuck in “the electrical socket of real-time digital news delivery.” And that’s the site he was likely refreshing on his phone.

It’s telling, in that context, that Blodget includes “news-gatherers” and “editors” in his list of wasteful affectations at the Journal. It’s little wonder D’oh Henry can’t comprehend the value of professional news-gatherers, editors, layers-out, and the rest, when all he wants to know is “Why Do Deople Hate Jews?” illustrated with a picture of Natalie Portman grabbed off Google Images. It’s like expecting Hamburglar to understand a soufflé. And yet… a search for “WSJ”on Business Insider returns 6,537 results for stories that found their genesis in those wasteful pages. (A search for “Wall Street Journal” brings up 7,760.)

Stupidity No. 3: On Friday evening, the NSFWCORP team went to an industrial park in Downtown Las Vegas to watch the first issue of NSFWCORP Print roll off the presses. Watching half a dozen technicians tweaking hundreds of variables to ensure exactly the right color separation, I took the time to reflect on all of the work that had led up to the moment where our digital files were converted to a print publication. Blodget is right about one thing: It’s a hell of a lot of effort to get something ready for print.

But that’s the point. The reason so much work goes into getting newspapers right is that they’re as close to permanent as any media we have. Once that ink is on paper, it’s staying there for a generation, maybe sixteen. A mistake on the Web can be deleted with a keystroke; for print you need to get your facts right, your phrasing near-perfect, your layout exact before you start the presses. And that’s the precise opposite of a bad thing. Each link in the chain between journalist and stack of paper outside the hotel room door demands greater care be taken to produce something that makes all that effort worthwhile. There’s a reason why “Dewey Defeats Truman” is still a remarkable event more than 60 years on.

By contrast, the Web — with its direct link between writer and reader — has given us the curse of iterative journalism. That is, the idea that a reporter can publish what he knows, or thinks he knows, the moment he thinks he knows it.

Iterative journalism is why Business Insider last week published a story by Julie Bort that hinged on Keith Rabois having been the COO of Foursquare. Rabois is, of course, the former COO of Square — a margin of error of plus/minus three Squares. Bort eventually corrected her error after commenters pointed it out, just like Blodget had to add no fewer than six notes and updates to his “Jews” post after readers cried foul. (Meanwhile another few thousand readers reminded themselves that, while Business Insider is great for quirky bullshit about millipedes, they should probably hold on to that Journal subscription for — yunno — news.)

A caveat. Yes, there are plenty of online publications that work hard to get the story right before hitting publish, and where iterative journalism is outlawed. (I’m contractually obliged to mention NSFWCORP and PandoDaily here. And AllThingsD for balance.) What’s interesting, though, is how many of the Web publications that strive to get it right first time are either allied to existing print publications or are lead by people who learned their craft in print.

As I’ve said a million times before: You don’t get to be Picasso until you’ve learned to paint a bowl of fruit. And you don’t get to comment on how stupid newspapers are if you’re so unfamiliar with them that you think their existence is, of itself, headline news.

(*It’s highly unlikely that any advertisers paid the Wall Street Journal to reach Henry Blodget. Everyone knows that to reach Henry Blodget, you need to throw your ad dollars at the Banned From Wall Street Journal.)

Paul Carr

paulcarr Paul Carr is author of "The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations" and "Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore". He has written for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, and TechCrunch. He is the founder of NSFW Corporation.


25 Mar 20:59

The existence of credit risk is currently blowing Europe’s collective mind

by Tim Fernholz
Dutch Finance Minister and leader of the eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem pauses before answering questions during a sitting of the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday, March 21, 2013. Cypriot officials are trying to find new ways to stave off financial ruin, including asking Russia for help, after its Parliament rejected a plan to contribute to the nation's bailout package by seizing depositors bank savings.

You know you’re having a big day as the head of the Eurogroup when shocked Financial Times writers out and demand your resignation.

That was a reaction to Dutch Financial Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s discussion of the final (for now) Cyprus bailout plan, which certainly included more satisfaction than one should take from the destruction of a tiny economy. What’s got the financial world up in the arms is the suggestion that Cyprus might offer a useful plan for the future:

What we’ve done last night is what I call pushing back the risks…If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalize yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalizing the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders…

The FT worries about bank runs: Customers at banks in Spain and Italy and France now realize that if their countries and banks end up in need of further financial assistance to stay in the euro zone, the private sector might have to take losses. This is already causing bank stock prices to drop, prompting a quick walk-back (pdf) that left everyone confused.

I think this sums up my take:

Re: Dijsselbloem. Scarcely has an uncontroversial statement – respect creditor hierarchy norms – proved so controversial—
euromoney.com (@euromoney) March 25, 2013

This is what Washington politicians call a “Kinsley gaffe“—Djisselbloem said something true that he shouldn’t have.

The fact—and the fear—is that the Eurogroup is changing expectations again: When they bailed out Greece, creditors got restructured, but Europe promised it was a one-time only thing. The ECB bailout of Spain was different: You guys recapitalize the banks, creditors stay whole, and the ECB provides the financing. When Cyprus, and its unique role as Russia’s offshore bank, came along, European leaders responded by reverting to the Greek model: Creditors got “bailed-in” and had to take losses. If nobody believes the Eurogroup—which is the organization of euro zone finance ministers—when they say that Cyprus is special, the next time a peripheral European country gets in trouble, people will rush their money out the doors.

The problem is that while Cyprus is special, it’s not that special. Germans don’t want to bailout Russian depositors, but they also don’t want to bail out anyone. The Spain model isn’t working and the expectation that it will means disappointment. A euro zone mired in recession is not going to be able to out-grow its debt problem with a weak financial system. Those banks needs to be recapitalized, and to avoid the problem of a fractured currency, it needs a banking union, something the Eurogroup has already begun work on. Recognizing reality may make markets nervous, but to solve the crisis, creditors, private or public, will eventually have to pay up.

It’s no surprise that Dijisselbloem would make this point: His country just nationalized an insolvent bank and, you guessed it, bailed-in some depositors and creditors to avoid putting the whole burden on taxpayers.  Denmark did the same twice last year. Even the FT notes that “the world’s changed for bank creditors in any case… there was already a bail-in directive on its way for Europe.”

That doesn’t make Cyprus ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Cypriots would probably be better off leaving the euro altogether. And the haphazard assembly of its bailout has left only two real principles intact: the euro will not be allowed to fail, and creditors will likely need to help with that. Balancing crisis management (stopping bank  runs) with reform (recapitalizing banks) is never easy, but after four years it might be worth thinking more clearly about the tensions between the two.


25 Mar 18:18

The Next Seven Years For Twitter Hang On Its Ability To Remain A Pure Communication Platform

by Drew Olanoff
8460369000_bc83bc8ac8_z

Twitter turned seven years old today. The company posted a fun video about its history, which we already know plenty about. We’ll get to that later, though. Another thing we know about Twitter is its impact. But the important question is this: What does the future look like for the company?

To remain relevant for the next seven years, Twitter has to stay true to its original mission of being an open communication platform. To do that, the company has to refrain from adding too many features and getting in the way of its core strengths, which is real-time notification of our stream of consciousness. Sure, the company can figure out how to monetize this all they like, because after all, employees don’t work for free and servers don’t pay for themselves.

I’ll save you all of the reminiscing about the major stories and moments that have broken on Twitter and instead focus on the fact that the company has cracked into the mainstream in a way that not many other services have. You can’t go a day without reading a story on ESPN where a player is quoted via a tweet they published. That says more about Twitter than any tech pundit, mom or teenager could ever say. Twitter has become a reliable source for information in real-time, and it’s only becoming more prevalent in our daily lives as the moments pass by.

When I hear Twitter’s founders discuss the early days of the service, there are still elements of that magic that can be seen today, only amplified. You can’t tweet about something that affects your company without getting in trouble and you certainly can’t misstep if you’re a public figure. Still though, in the midst of these millions of tweets, there is a sense of intimacy that hasn’t been matched by any other social service. The only thing that is between you and millions of people is the tweet button.

Exactly one year ago today, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.


Xeni Jardin (@xeni) December 01, 2012

When you see a tweet like the one above, other than it being very personal, you have to remember that Xeni was referencing something she spoke about on Twitter a year before that moment. Using Twitter, she had kept people informed on her progress, her roadblocks and everything in between. If you were to follow her on Twitter you’d be able to connect with her and her thoughts and emotions in a way that you could never do on Myspace, Friendster or even Facebook. It’s real, it’s raw and it’s right now. It’s pure. It simply has to stay that way.

There have been rumors that Twitter will be launching its own music app and that’s causing some to rehash the discussion about how Twitter will change and become a horrible “media company.” That argument doesn’t hold much water. This music app, which Twitter hasn’t confirmed or denied, would be a standalone app that simply uses all of the signals that we’re giving the service to yank out useful recommendations and music listening options. The same thing happened with Vine. If you remember, Twitter wanted to get into video, so it bought the service and launched it in a standalone fashion. Sure, you can see Vines within your Twitter stream, but if you’re really into video, the Vine app is where you’ll spend your time. By segmenting all of these different types of media into their own apps, Twitter is actually protecting its platform. To be successful in the future, this needs to continue.

Having said all of this, Twitter is indeed trying to build a successful business and company in the hopes of going public as early as next year. You can’t hold that against them, but you can hold them to their original appeal, which is a clean platform that only asks you to share “What’s Happening?” in 140 characters. If that ever changes dramatically, we can then start to worry.

Here’s how our founder, Michael Arrington, described Twitter (then called Twttr) when it launched in 2006:

Odeo released a new service today called Twttr, which is a sort of “group send” SMS application. Each person controls their own network of friends. When any of them send a text message to “40404,” all of his or her friends see the message via sms.

After seven years, this description still rings true. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Now, if you’d like to watch, here’s Twitter’s celebratory seventh birthday video:

[Photo credit: Flickr]


25 Mar 18:16

Private Photo And Video Sharing Service For Families, Famil.io, Is Like A Dropbox For Memories

by Sarah Perez
familioLogo

Famil.io, a new service for privately sharing photos and videos with your family across web and mobile, is today officially launching to the public. The sharing platform can serve as a complement to Facebook, where most families network today, though in a more restrained fashion. Or for those family members who aren’t even active on Facebook, Famil.io can, to some extent, serve as a replacement.

The service works online, or as a web browser extension (initially for Chrome), and on iOS or Android. This cross-platform support was critical for Famil.io, CEO Iftach Yair explains.

Yair joined Famil.io, which is being incubated within Israel’s lool.vc, around six months ago to help co-founder Iftach (yes, also!) Orr bring the product to the market. Lool.vc operates in a similar manner to Betaworks here in the U.S., in that it funds and incubates startups, providing them with office space, resources and support.

“I took the basic project that was running and made a lot of changes in it,” explains Yair. “The major one was to take Famil.io from a destination site and an app, into a cross-platform, cross-generation product,” he says. “In order to make this product work, you have to make it agnostic of the platform or devices that your family is using. If you’re going to build a product for iPhones or Android, and look away from the desktop, then you’ll be leaving a good chunk of your family aside, and that will make your product unsuccessful,” Yair adds.

It’s a good argument, and one that’s especially applicable to my personal situation, because my own parents are Facebook holdouts. (My father is a state Court of Appeals judge, and it’s discouraged.) But in every family, there are those – often older members – who aren’t as active on Facebook than others. Famil.io finally includes them.

The website and Chrome extension are very simple to use, though someone might have to help the grandparents with the latter. During the private beta with some 7,000 users, the thing the non-technical users said they liked about the Chrome add-on is that it takes over Chrome’s “new tab” page, putting photos and updates from family directly in their browser. (For those like me who actually use the new tab page, not to worry – you can disable this in the Settings.)

Famil.io reminds me a lot of Familiar, which offers a strikingly similar service for photo-sharing, but one that revolves around screensavers, as opposed to an online application. As of year-end 2012, following its $1.3 million seed round from Greylock, Indx, Redpoint, Allen & Company, and others, Familiar said it had displayed over 200 million photos, and was seeing 135 percent month-over-month growth in November.

Sometimes the industry has trouble parsing services like this, which eschew chasing the “next big thing” to focus instead on the second wave of technology adopters. But these services can find their niche among those families looking for simpler solutions. When I stopped updating my Familiar briefly, for instance, my sister even called me to complain that she had no new photos of her niece.

Of course, going after the long tail isn’t a future-proof strategy for obvious reasons, but Famil.io has plans to offer a differentiated feature set in the future, which should have broader appeal.

Currrently, with Famil.io, the idea is that instead of screensavers, users can receive push notifications, not entirely different from Facebook’s own notifications, right in their web browser via the browser extension. This is helpful because on Facebook, users tend to miss a lot of their family photos because of the noise and the way Facebook’s news feed works, Yair says. “Some people think that by sharing on Facebook, everyone sees the photos, but the reality is that because of the Facebook Graph, only around 15 percent of photos are viewed at any time,” Yair claims. (Facebook’s news feed algorithms are always in flux, we should note, so these numbers tend to change. Still, the overall point – that things get missed – is accurate.)

He also adds that as people’s networks have expanded, they’ve grown less comfortable with sharing all their family photos on Facebook. “I don’t want to spam everyone with photos of my son,” Yair explains, giving a personal example. “This is an issue…most people don’t really care about other people’s kids that much.”

Oh yes.

Remember the UnbabyMe movement? This kind of takes care of that problem.

Currently, Famil.io’s platform supports high-res photo uploads from your computer or phone, plus support for photo imports from Facebook (for those that may have been missed). Videos are supported as well, and in the future, the company will add the option for sharing posts, also like Facebook. Users can comment on and like the shared photos and videos, too.

One of the more interesting things about the service is that everyone builds their own Famil.io groups – just because you’re invited to join a group with Aunt Sally in it, doesn’t mean that your spouse (who can’t stand the woman), has to have her in his group in order to see your shares. That’s different from how most group-based services work today – it’s more flexible.

The long-term goal is not just to mimic Facebook’s feature set, while serving a private audience – but to offer something tangible to its users. Famil.io plans to monetize by offering built-in, print-on-demand services for photo prints and photobooks, among other things, as well as a way to pay for “lifetime storage,” meaning secure, online hosting and easy-to-export data.

Pricing for these things has not yet been worked out. The service itself is free to use – sign up is here.


25 Mar 17:49

Google Reader Who? Feedly Became Top News App On iPhone, iPad & Android This Week; New App Now Awaiting Approval

by Sarah Perez
feedly-logo

Where are the users headed following news of Google Reader’s shutdown? To Feedly, it seems. We already heard the company announce it had passed half a million new users, but more importantly, Feedly is now winning on mobile, too. According to new U.S. App Store and Google Play data, Feedly is leaving competitors like NewsBlur and Reeder far behind. Even though Google Reader will remain for a few months more, Feedly became the No. 1 news app across all three top mobile platforms (iPhone, iPad and Android) this week. It even climbed into the “Top Overall” section within all three stores.

This data is current as of mid-week. Today, Reuters moved up on iOS to bump Feedly to No. 2 on iPad, and No. 4 on iPhone. On Android it’s still No. 1.

Also, the data is U.S.-only, so it doesn’t present a complete view of the situation. But it’s notable as to where the Reader-replacement race stands now in one of Google Reader’s top regions.

Ten days prior to the Reader announcement, the average daily downloads for the Apple App Store for Feedly were around 1,200 to 1,300, according to app analytics firm Distimo. Since the news broke, Feedly downloads have increased more than tenfold to over 16,000 per day, on average.

Competitor NewsBlur, which also has a mobile client, is currently generating 1,000 to 2,000 downloads per day since the news broke – Feedly’s pre-Reader shutdown levels, basically.

It’s worth noting that Feedly has been at the game longer, and has been preparing in advance for the end of Reader. It has a transition plan in place already. NewsBlur, admirably, is a one-man shop. It’s inspiring to watch Samuel Clay scale that thing on his own. And it’s open source, so it has that going for it. But a mission-critical app can’t go into maintenance mode after Reader is gone, so people may be nervous about NewsBlur right now.

By the numbers, it’s Feedly’s half million users vs. NewsBlur’s 60,000+, currently. Things, of course, could quickly change – and the horse race is not limited to these two.

In The Running?

People are also responding to the branding of “The Old Reader“ (though it’s not really like the old one). It also struggles under the load, and the mobile interface needs work. Digg has pre-announced its intentions, but we know nothing of the final product. Black Pixel surprised everyone with plans for the return of NetNewsWire, which happens to be TechCrunch writer Frederic Lardinois’s preferred client. Reeder has a plan for D-Day, but limits itself to the Apple world.

There’s also a spreadsheet being passed around which lists about 50 alternatives to Reader, so no need to bore you by listing all of them here.

But only some are true replacements. Everybody with a remotely related news-reading service is trying to get a piece of the action these days. Zite, for example, very disingenuously posted last week that it had “rebuilt” Google Reader in six hours. That was seriously messed up. Zite is a news magazine. A news magazine is by no means a Reader replacement.

Feedly might not ever transition into a full Reader replacement, either. Founder Edwin Khodabakchian says he’s “trying to find the right balance” between what Feedly has built and serving the news of its new audience, which is demanding a minimalistic view of their feeds, like Reader offered. To some extent, he’s responding to their concerns. (And for those still not happy with the Feedly UI, there are always userscripts and Chrome extensions.)

“Our goal is not to copy per se, but understand the behaviors and workflows and try to support them as best as we can,” Khodabakchian says.

He also tells us that Feedly has been working for the past five months on a very big mobile update, which is being approved by Apple right now. The app should be out soon – maybe a week at best.

“The private beta feedback we collected on that update is by far the best we have had over the last 18 months,” he says. And he promises that Google Reader refugees will appreciate the new title view that the app offers.

Fingers crossed.


25 Mar 17:46

AWS Reveals In Job Listing It's Launching “A New Business,” Looks To Be Pushing Deeper Into Mobile

by Rip Empson,Alex Williams
amazon-web-services

Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft.

The strategy has been to continue offering more and more services, beating its opponents at scale, while operating on razor-thin margins. And so far it’s been working: As Alex said in December, through its programmable architecture, volume and tiny margins, AWS has built a “$1.5 billion business.”

Now, it seems that AWS is looking to apply its model to mobile to get deeper into enterprise — with the creation of what looks to be a whole new arm of its cloud division. TechCrunch today learned of a job listing that has been posted both on its own site and on Stack Overflow that, in its attempt to allure engineers, describes the position as one that will be part of a new business.

“The Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is launching a new business,” it says plainly, and is looking for someone who wants to build “amazing customer experiences on tablet and mobile apps on Android or iOS platforms.”

The post continues:

In this role, you will be responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android … As a member of the founding team, you will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define the product features, drive system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality v1 product setting the ground work for a successful v2 and beyond.

While we don’t know yet what Amazon has cooking (we’ve reached out and are awaiting their comment), we do know that they’re launching a new business that is focused on building “quality software” for mobile and for those with deep experience building tablet apps. It will be a new product, something AWS hasn’t done before and the team will be small, iterating quickly in a “hyper-growth environment where priorities shift fast.”

Again, Amazon needs a way to get deeper into the enterprise market as well as offer more for developers who increasingly look to their mobile devices to manage their apps.

AWS has been showing off its capabilities by adding the ability for its customers to quickly create virtual private clouds, and it’s been dropping its prices across the board. EC2 discounts, messaging and notifications, you name it.

Rishidot Research Founder Krishnan Subramanian says that Amazon looks to me “making a play on the front-end and looking to build out a management service to build apps for AWS on multiple mobile platforms.”

For the most part, developers access AWS through the web, Subramanian said. Third-party providers are offering mobile apps, not Amazon. This new group could be charged with building a new arsenal of mobile apps.

AWS does need to make a backend play but this job posting does not reflect that. As it stands right now, Amazon doesn’t have the middleware, or cloud-based mobile SDK, which would allow mobile developers to build an app without having to worry about building their own stack. However, given how well Kinvey and others (who do offer this support) are doing, Amazon will likely look to get into that space.

Eventually, there’s going to be a bloodbath in this space, or a feed frenzy. Kinvey et al have already begun to feed off Oracle, IBM and the other enterprise giants, and Amazon would be remiss if it wasn’t on its gameplan.

But that is not the priority with this job posting. More so it looks like a way for the company to appeal to people who use mobile devices to manage their AWS instances.


25 Mar 16:12

The end of an era?

PAUL KRUGMAN writes:

Let me make a broader point: we’ve now seen three island nations around Europe become huge international banking hubs relative to their GDPs, then get into crisis because their domestic economies don’t have the resources to bail out those metastasized banking systems if something goes wrong. This strongly suggests, to me at least, that we have a fundamental problem with the whole architecture (to use the preferred fancy word) of international finance...

All of which raises the question, is the era of free capital movement just a bubble, fated to end one of these years, maybe soon?

Hm. Well, the world's second largest economy maintains very tight controls over capital flows. The third largest economy is actively engaged in managing its currency. The sixth-largest economy has used capital controls to limit appreciation of its currency. Many of the world's other large economies are part of a monetary union actively experimenting with a handful of financial-repression mechanisms. The International Monetary Fund has taken the official position that the use of capital controls may be warranted as a financial stability tool. And so on. I would say that the era of free capital mobility is definitely on life-support.

Now, many of these policies may be designed to be temporary. And China looks interested in gradual liberalisation of its capital controls. But there are two reasons to think that the trend will continue toward less rather than more mobility. One is that a half-open world is probably not a stable equilibrium. Everyone can hold hands and jump into mobility and create a stable equilibrium that way. But as some defect from that equilibrium openness begins to look much less attractive for the others, who may absorb outsize inflows or outflows, or who may bear the brunt of others' currency manipulation. One might argue that open countries will therefore press others to return to the open equilibrium, but that moves us to the second issue: capital flow restrictions will be very useful to countries interested in using a bit of inflation to chip away at high debt levels. And that includes just about everyone.

20 Mar 17:40

16 Fantastic Behind The Scenes Of Photos From Famous Films

by Alex Wain

Every DVD released these days comes packaged with bonus footage – whether that be an ‘alternate ending’, commentary from the Director or interviews with the cast themselves.

But rarely do you ever get to see the ‘true’ making of the film. What happens on set, the techniques they use & the props they build are often closely guarded secrets. Fundamentally film studios don’t want to give away their tricks of the trade as it were!

But in a world of CGI and 3D effects, you still need actors, crews and more importantly direction to piece it all together.

Here’s 16 images (in addition to our 20 Images From Classic Movies post) that give you an inside perspective as to what happens behind the camera on iconic movie sets such as The Terminator, Iron Man, Star Wars, JAWS, The Muppets, Titanic, The Dark Knight and Inception. We’ve even included recent releases like Tarantino’s impressive Django.

There will always been an element of magic & illusion when it comes to making movies, but as you’re about to see, that magic rests entirely in the hands, vision & imagination of those working away on set.

1. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

16 Behind The Scenes Of Photos From Famous Movies

2. Inception

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 2

3. Ghostbusters

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 3

4. The Muppet Movie

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 4

5. The Shining

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 5

6. Django

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 6

7. The Dark Knight

16-Photos-From-Behind-The-Scenes-Of-Famous-Films-7

8. Terminator

16-Photos-From-Behind-The-Scenes-Of-Famous-Films-8

9. Titanic

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 9

10. Iron Man

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 10

11. Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 11

12. The Dark Knight

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 12

13. Pulp Fiction

16-Photos-From-Behind-The-Scenes-Of-Famous-Films-13

14. JAWS

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 14

15. Titanic

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 15

16. E.T.

16 Photos From Behind The Scenes Of Famous Films 16

ENJOYED IT? SHARE IT!

14 Mar 02:12

Here’s 20 Of The Most Ridiculous Job Titles In History

by Alex Wain

You probably had countless highschool teachers and relatives ask you “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” few, if any of us would have replied with “Bride Kidnapping Expert” but hey someone has to do it right?

The following 20 job titles (and we do use that term very loosely) are ridiculous at the best of times, still the caption creator must have enjoyed a laugh reading them prior to typing them up on the show – maybe they just made them up on the spot? Either way, we hope you enjoy this fine selection, do let us know your personal fav and hey, if you could have any job title in the world – what would yours be exactly?

Probably 20 Of The Most Ludicrous Job Titles In History

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-2

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-3

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-4

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-5

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-6

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-7

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-8

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-1020-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-9

 

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-12

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-11

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-16

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-13

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-17

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-14

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-18

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-15

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-19

20-Of-The-Most-Ridiculous-Job-Titles-Ever-Created-20

ENJOYED THEM? SHARE THEM!

14 Mar 02:06

14 Fresh And Mouth-Watering Beer Label Designs

by Alex Wain

So full disclosure before we begin, we’ve tried less than 25% of these rather interesting beverages, so we can’t tell you whether they taste like nectar from the Gods or cheap methylated spirit BUT one thing we do know, is that they all have some pretty impressive designs and labels going on.

You might not have heard of many of these niche / limited release beers but you can’t deny they all certainly look worth buying a bottle or two and giving them a taste don’t they? Many of them are manufactured in the United States as well as some from Canada, so if you live outside of those countries you might have to go to your local importer and see if they have samples floating around. Underneath each design we’ve included links to the brewing companies themselves – so if you’re feeling a burning desire to try some of them out, at least you have a starting point.

We found it pretty hard to choose our favourite illustration / logo, although the consensus in the office is that everyone wanted to try ‘Winter Beard’ because lets face it, how wrong can you go with a combination of double chocolate and cranberry?

Leave a comment below and let us know which you’d like to sample or better yet, if you’ve been lucky enough to crack open one of them – tell us what you thought? We’d love to know!

1. Wake Up Dead Imperial Stout

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via lefthandbrewing.com

2. Infinium

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via Samueladams.com

3. Cannonball (IPA), Rapture (Red Ale), High Wire (Pale Ale)

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via magicrockbrewing.com

4. Four In Hand IPA

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via Fourinhandbrews.com

5. He’Brew Beer

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via shmaltzbrewing.com

6. Hitachino (Japanese Ale, White Ale &a Weizen)

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via kodawari.cc

7. Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via flyingdogales.com

8. Winter Beard (Double chocolate cranberry stout)

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via Muskokabrewery.com

9. Hennepin Chocolate Stout

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via Ommegang.com

10.A Wee Angry Scotch Ale

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via Russellbeer.com

11. Ohio Honey Wheat

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via columbusbrewingco.com

12. Atlantic IPA

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via brewdog.com

13. 21st Amendment

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via 21st-amendment.com

14. Coney Island Craft Lagers

14 Fresh, Modern And Mouth-Watering Beer Labels
Find out more via shmaltzbrewing.com

ENJOYED IT? SHARE IT!

13 Dec 22:27

17 Things I Learned From Reading Every Last Word of The Economist's "The World in 2013" Issue

by By MARK LEIBOVICH
I've been telling people I read The Economist since college. But like many people in Washington, I am a complete fraud.