HR is never for you. That’s why it doesn’t work. Last month, I joined the sold-out audience at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco for an evening of conversation between two class women: Hill Anita and Ellen Pao. The idea was to have two women of different eras, with similar stories, compare notes about the … Read more
Hello Backchannel readers! this is Sandra. In the early 1700s, Peter the Great, the emperor of Russia, was busy taking land from his western neighbor, the Swedish Empire. He captured the tip of the Gulf of Finland and began building his beloved city of Saint Petersburg there. He also defended a small island just off … Read more
Typography is in development an open renaissance. Typography often tries to be invisible, but lately it has become a subtle marker for readers to notice and comment. Suddenly, people outside the design profession seemed interested in its many intricacies. Usually, this awareness focuses on execution. This year’s Oscars set visual hierarchy on map. XKCD readers … Read more
After game two, Kasparov was not only agitated by his defeat but also doubted how the computer made an outrageous… move like a computer. “It made me question everything,” he wrote. Receiving prints explaining what the computer did – and proving that there was no human intervention – became an obsession for him. In fact, … Read more
Eli Pariser foretold the future. Now he cannot get rid of it. Six years after the Upworthy co-founder coined the term “filter bubble,” things got even worse.
When Ibraheem Ibraheem signed up to drive for Uber in 2014, which was just a side gigs while he earned his degree in computer science at New York City’s Brooklyn College. He never thought he was the kind of person who, 18 months from now, would sit across from Uber management, angrily telling them they … Read more
Startup is proud of itself of naive ignorance that allows them to rethink traditional industries – think Airbnb will go against hotels or Uber to join taxi alliances. It’s much easier to “move quickly and break things” when you’re not being told about what you’re trying to break down. Kaplan himself noted that his inexperience … Read more
These are not cheap fixes. Thumbs and low-capacity external drives are relatively cheap, but the time involved in setting up the drive can start with the necessary software and data (and make sure it all works) is not trivial if you do it yourself. It took me several hours, but I have copied the results … Read more
A few months later, during a second meeting with Jobs, Muffly really figured out what Apple was thinking. They chatted again in Jobs’ conference room on the 4th floor of One Infinite Loop, repeating some of the topics of the first interview, when Jobs suddenly asked Muffly, “Have you seen it?” Jobs took him to … Read more
According to Mary Meeker, things are improving, even as global smartphone growth tends to decline. Hello Backchannel readers! it’s Jessi. On Wednesday, Kleiner Perkins investor Mary Meeker released her annual internet trends report at the Code Conference, the annual gathering in south Los Angeles, like a summer camp reunion like a technology conference. Meeker is … Read more
