Techmeme: Problem for advertisers: more than half of online video ads go unwatched below the fold, in tiny players, or played simultaneously with other ads (David Segal/New York Times)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

May 5, 2014, 7:25 AM

Top News

Fred Wilson / AVC:

Square and Box face a combination of high valuations, equally high burn rates, and a disappearing IPO market — The Valuation Trap — There is a long article on Square and Box in TechCrunch this weekend. I am not sold on the arguments the author makes about the commodity nature of both products.

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @karaswisher, @bgurley, @davidmarcus, @howardlindzon, @bhorowitz and @dannycrichton

Danny Crichton / TechCrunch:

With IPO Hopes Fading, Square And Box Face Reality Of Commodity Products — Square and Box would seem to be the very epitome of every startup founder's dream of reaching the pinnacle of entrepreneurial success. Take a kernel of an idea and turn it into a massive, multi-billion-dollar company that publicly debuts in an IPO.

Tweets: @trengriffin

Will Oremus / Slate:

Twitter isn't dying: active users and timeline views don't capture the platform's vast reach — Twitter Is Not Dying — Well, that's it folks: Twitter is dead. It had a good flight. A short flight, but a noisy one. Sadly, it is now headed the way of Flappy Bird.

More: The Atlantic Online, Vox, TIME, Reuters, TechCrunch, ReadWrite and BuzzFeed

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @nickbilton, @fromedome, @glennf, @lorenb, @nickbilton, @meryn, @hornokplease, @eric_andersen, @digiphile and @mikeisaac

Thanks:@anprtweets. See also Mediagazer

Ben Thompson / stratechery:

Twitter's problem: the initial idea was so great that they never needed to learn their market — Twitter's Marketing Problem — Twitter's unconventional path is well-documented at this point. From failed podcasting company to playground sketch (actually, probably not) …

More: Trends. Tweets: @simonowens, @carnage4life, @joshelman, @lorenb, @hershberg, @norrisnode and @monkbent

Donnie Berkholz / Donnie Berkholz's Story of Data:

GitHub language trends and the fragmenting landscape — A while ago, I wanted to get a little quick feedback on some data I was playing with, but the day was almost over and I wasn't done working on it yet. I decided to tweet my rough draft of a graph of GitHub language trends anyway, followed later by a slight improvement.

More: RedMonk and tecosystems. Tweets: @hnshah, @merv, @mojavelinux and @jimpresley63

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

Facebook Woos Mobile Developers, but Is It Too Late? — Not so long ago, the key to building a successful app business required piggybacking on an existing big network like Facebook. — But relying on Facebook for your paycheck also meant being subject to the whims of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Tweets: @qthrul and @bokardo

TechCrunch:

Everything Facebook Launched At f8 And Why

More: Wired, Mobile Opportunity and The Digital Letter

Harry McCracken / TIME:

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal — Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it's a shame more people don't learn to do it. For years now, that's been a hugely popular stance. It's led to educational initiatives as effortless sounding …

More: Gizmodo, TechCrunch and MSDN Blogs. Thanks:@srikardr

Carmel DeAmicis / PandoDaily:

17-year-old Michael Sayman on building 4Snaps, meeting Zuckerberg, his Facebook internship, and appearing at F8 — How a Florida kid's “stupid app” saved his family's home and landed him on the main stage at Facebook — Michael Sayman is not your average tech entrepreneur.

Stephen Shankland / CNET:

Nokia investing $100M in smart-car technology — The Finnish technology company aims to make money off the profound transformation of driving made possible by the combining automobiles with computing and networking technology. — Fresh after selling its mobile-phone business to Microsoft …

More: Nokia, BBC, Tech in Asia, Tech.eu, The Next Web, Reuters, NextBigWhat, Webrazzi and Bloomberg

David Segal / New York Times:

Problem for advertisers: more than half of online video ads go unwatched below the fold, in tiny players, or played simultaneously with other ads — The Great Unwatched — Some of the biggest names in Internet media have been gathering in New York City at the third annual Digital Content NewFronts …

More: Beyond Search and Beet.TV. Tweets: @zimbalist, @rafat, @simonkhalaf, @pkafka, @rafat, @fredbenenson and @carr2n. See also Mediagazer

Christopher Beam / The New Republic:

Why Chinese URLs use Arabic numerals over Mandarin characters or Latin letters — Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs — Decoding 4008-517-517.com — An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted …

More: Gizmodo and TheDomains.com

Michael J. De La Merced / New York Times:

Peer-to-peer lending marketplace Prosper raises $70M at around a $600M valuation — Prosper, a Peer-to-Peer Lender, Raises $70 Million — As peer-to-peer lending — in which borrowers connect with lenders directly online — takes off, one of the biggest players in the field is taking advantage by raising more money.

More: TechCrunch, TechCrunch, Re/code and PE Hub Blog

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cape:

Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.

Zoho:

Introducing Zoho Expense Integrated Travel solution : The Smarter Way to Manage Business Travel — Business travel has become increasingly complex. Employees expect consumer-grade booking experiences …

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Great Chat:

Tech's short-term era

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Access:

Meet the most AI-pilled CEO on Earth

A show about the tech industry's inside conversation, hosted by tech reporter Alex Heath and founder whisperer Ellis Hamburger.

Subscribe to Access.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Basis's Matt Harpe: Why AI Won't Replace Accountants — It'll Make Them Richer

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Channels with Peter Kafka:

Lucas Shaw on Warner Bros' Limbo, Netflix's Anxiety, and Hollywood's Sort-of Comeback

Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.

Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.

Big Technology Podcast:

How China Caught U.S. AI — With Grace Shao

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:25 AM ET, May 5, 2014.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.