What We’re Reading

1. Fast Company tends to be into big CEO profiles, often leaving readers feeling as though they know a bit more about someone, or perhaps some myths have been debunked. Generally positive in their reporting, the magazine has become something of a feel good profiler in the technology industry (if you didnt like Travis and Uber before, you might after this). However, we were genuinely impressed by the well-written, thoroughly researched piece on Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook. With his loyal and high profile staff largely intact, the ability to actually change the world and an obvious penchant for curiosity and learning, its hard not to appreciate everything Facebook has become. An undoubtedly strong effort to cultivate talking points and craft exactly the image has clearly paid off (right from the first line, a quote from an in-house PR person) but we’ll happily believe it as Zuckerburg continues to effectively grow and run his $256B company.
2. Someone created a database that tracks the activity of pigeons in movies. You can’t make this stuff up. Thanks Time for the crack reporting.
3. SPOILER ALERT: “marketers” still don’t know how to sell to millennials (who apparently just don’t want to buy anything), so they are throwing money at the problem. In fact, 500% more money than they seem to be spending on any other age group right now. Please note the especially tough fake tweets on the side of the bottom half of the infographic. Oh “marketers.”
4. The Holiday Season is in full swing so what better time for another, slightly more forgiving article from the New York Times about Amazon. In this new piece, we learn the stock has doubled in 2015 and have some more insight into the reasons why. Worth a few minutes to read about the company that runs everything from AWS (a $160B business) to selling, in possibly as few as five years, half of American families a Prime membership.
5. Cult and sometime mainstream favorite Rdio was sold under duress to Pandora this week and the Atlantic whipped up a very compelling piece to voice what was on the mind of many true music lovers: why? The article is kind to Rdio “It gleamed with a well-considered uncomplicatedness that I’ve come to recognize as the residue of good design” while also careful to point out the app’s flaws, noting that the author had moved recently to Spotify himself after years of Rdio stewardship and playlist cultivation. Ultimately, the piece asks us how we feel about the coming and going of things we cannot hold on to- our parents loved records, we love steaming services. What does that say about us as a generation? And where do we keep all this data that is now going away?”At its best, Rdio had perhaps the kindest community in online music.” Thanks, Rdio, for giving us a beautiful product and earnestly trying to figure out how to deliver music the way we might have really wanted it.
6. Do you know what football players wear for their press conferences? Neither did we until Tim Ryan showed us the light with his hilarious commentary.

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