When Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, recently went public, tech investors rejoiced. But will the startup make good on the hype? But more importantly, will this lead to the resurgence of the IPO market. Jury is still out. Here is why! Continue reading The Trouble with Silicon Valley’s IPO Optimism
Late November last year, I wrote a piece about Silicon Valley’s Empathy Vacuum for The New Yorker. It seemed to have struck a chord with a lot of people, especially in our industry. I am glad we started to talk about the issues we don’t normally talk about — the human consequence of disruption and … Continue reading From Tech’s Empathy Vacuum to Zuck’s 2017 Challenge
2016, for me, will go down as a year of writing like the old days — back when I used to work for Red Herring and Business 2.0. The opportunity to write for the New Yorker has allowed me to think deep and hard about a lot of issues, and frame them for a different audience all together. The dozen pieces from this year (and an additional one from the last day of 2015) are satisfying. In case you missed any of these, here is a quick rewind. Continue reading “Here is what I wrote for New Yorker in 2016”
….the bigness of today’s Big Five gives them an opportunity to keep building larger moats around their platforms. For starters, these companies are able to hoard data, which allows them to become smarter in learning about their customers. Because of their leviathan-scale operations, they have the infrastructure and resources to write algorithms and make their … Continue reading Apple, Amazon & Google & the Advantages of Bigness
My latest column for The New Yorker: Put aside the sudden revival of our interest in Pokémon and consider what this spurt tells us about the future of software and the nature of reality—and how they integrate into what we think of as entertainment. Continue reading What PokemanGo Means For Augmented Reality
In my most recent piece for The New Yorker, I ask what I think is the most relevant question: What are the realistic abilities and limits of Facebook’s news feed? The more the company tweaks the feed in a crude and blunt manner, the more one has to wonder if Facebook’s alogrithms are not only … Continue reading Facebook’s News Feed: How good is it anyway?
The shutdown of ride-sharing startup, SideCar, is part of technology industry’s reality. It is also part of the new emergent reality — today’s technology business are made up with a tight loop of algorithms, infrastructure and data. Add network effects to the mix, and you start to see virtual monopolies emerge almost overnight. Case in point, Facebook. … Continue reading Winner Take All
