Gracenote

Slashdot again, this time on the curious recent sale of the audio metadata firm Gracenote. Also crossposted to the discussion site.

The merger is an unusual one: Gracenote owns a massive library of media metadata, and the Tribune Company is best known as the publisher of print newspapers and tabloids, most notably its flagship paper in Chicago. Five years ago, Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy as advertising revenues declined, the result of the global recession; at the time, Gracenote had just been acquired by Sony for almost $100 million more than its most recent price.

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Posted: Monday, February 17th, 2014 at 1:34 pm
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Categories: Writing

Google Glass accessories

My article for Slashdot about the importance of an accessory market to the success of Google Glass. This time, a relatively civil discussion!

Each iPhone accessory and app is both a potential selling point as well as a tether for existing users—if you need to re-buy your cables, apps, docks, mounts, and speakers, even a free phone starts to look a lot less compelling. Google Glass isn’t a phone and doesn’t have any direct competitors running iOS, but it is still the closest thing there is to a market leader in the emerging world of wearable computing. As such, it currently faces similar strategy questions which could prove just as influential in defining its success.

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Posted: Thursday, January 30th, 2014 at 4:13 am
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Categories: Writing

New Yorker

An update: I’ve started working at The New Yorker doing a mix of writing and programming – tech projects for the editorial division, basically. I’m still not quite sure which dog I’d be in this scenario.

Posted: Saturday, September 7th, 2013 at 10:27 pm
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Categories: Writing

GitHub

I wrote an article for the New Yorker about the popular collaborative coding platform GitHub:

GitHub allowed coders to collaborate easily over the Internet, providing messaging and social features that would feel familiar to current users of social networks—for example, the ability to follow particular chunks of code in projects the way one might follow people on Twitter. The primary difference is that on GitHub the users share code, not photos and LOLcats.

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Posted: Thursday, August 8th, 2013 at 2:19 pm
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Categories: Writing

Get Off My Lawn

For Slashdot, a complaint cheekily titled “How DRM Won” which explains why current business practices at streaming media companies like Spotify are culturally destructive:

In 2009, when Apple dropped the Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions from songs sold through the iTunes Store, it seemed like a huge victory for consumers, one that would usher in a more customer-friendly economy for digital media. But four years later, DRM is still alive and well—it just lives in the cloud now.

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Posted: Wednesday, July 10th, 2013 at 3:02 pm
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Categories: Writing

Full Stack Javascript

I love Wired, The Verge, and Ars Technica as much as anybody, but there’s really no debate that Slashdot is easily the nerdiest of the various tech industry news sites. In fact, it’s primarily how I learned about technology and programming myself. That’s why I am thrilled to have started writing for them.

My first article, for their Business Intelligence section, is about JavaScript, specifically how software packages like Node.js and MongoDB are using it in new contexts and turning it into a full-stack language that works at every stage of the development process.

It’s effectively impossible to launch a sophisticated Web project without making extensive use of JavaScript and AJAX dynamic loading. That’s precisely why recent projects that move JavaScript beyond its usual boring domain of defining in-browser interactivity are so interesting—because it’s already dominant, and growing even more so.

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Posted: Thursday, June 27th, 2013 at 1:09 pm
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Categories: Writing
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