Reddit: A Cultural Force

Reddit Sticker (Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)

Reddit has emerged a cultural force of sorts. It is an open source community, whereas Digg was more of a Windows community.

Why Did Reddit Succeed Where Digg Failed?

Reddit is more engaged. The primary thing you do on Reddit is you comment. Reddit is not a technological marvel. The tech part is fairly simple. Their innovation has been at the community level. They have managed to reimagine what an online community is. Going light weight goes a long way, it seems like.

One of the first teams, for instance, wanted to develop a way for people to order fast food by text message. Graham steered the founders away from that idea, and they ended up creating the social news site Reddit

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Google Fingerprints All Over The Map

Image via CrunchBase

AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, FourSquare, Pinterest, Yahoo.

Google Seals Its Reputation for Minting Tech Executives

Google is the new GE. It is the fundamental company of the Internet era.

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Gmail SMS: Big Deal

English: mobile phone text message (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google launches Gmail SMS, letting users in Africa send and receive emails by text message

This should be global. And it should apply to more services beyond email. And it should go beyond Google. SMS is a key sub category within mobile. Just like web services have been figuring out how to go mobile, they need to figure out how to go SMS.

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Visionaries

Historic Microsoft photo of Paul Allen (left) and Bill Gates (respectively) on October 19, 1981 surrounded by PCs after signing a major contract with IBM to develop software for its upcoming PC line. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Large companies can only find real Visionaries by looking for people who have been right more than once, and never right because they rode somebody else’s wave. Having found one of these rare unicorns, Visionaries are often completely at odds with the skillset needed to survive in large organizations. They are not politically savvy (or don’t care). They do not do well in meetings. They do not crave gigantic staffs to manage. They will not suck up at the expense of doing something they know is wrong, or even a little bit less right. They are prickly and uncompromising. Yet, you must not only find them, you must prop them up and make them successful despite all the antibodies the entrenched burocracies at Microsoft and Yahoo will generate to try to expel them. It’s not going to be fun, but the alternative is a continuing slide into irrelevance at the hands of the Visionaries in other companies. That’s even less fun and you’ve had a taste of what that’s all about.

Source: SmoothSpan

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MM

Hey @marissamayer, if you make Flickr awesome again at Yahoo!, you can have my Twitter handle.

— Morgan Missen (@mm) July 17, 2012

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The Truth About Marissa Mayer: She Has Two Contrasting Reputations

FoxConn Style Outsourcing

Deutsch: Foxconn Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When companies like Apple outsource production, they send it off to FoxConn that employs people who do great work for cheap. But what does FoxConn do when it decides to outsource? Looks like there is a plan.

Migrant Workers in China Face Competition from Robots

Foxconn, which employs nearly one million low-wage workers to hand-assemble electronic gadgets for Apple, Nintendo, Intel, Dell, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony..... the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant would add up to one million industrial robots to its assembly lines inside of three years

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Big Data For The Masses

Big Data (Photo credit: Kevin Krejci)

Big Data is not new. Walmart has been crunching Big Data for decades now. What's futuristic about the term  though is that Big Data is about to descend to the masses.

Technology Review: Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data

As technology gets more networked, and data sets get larger, graph computation is becoming more and more relevant in many domains ... "Enabling web developers to construct these analyses on their desktop computers catalyzes these industries and accelerates product development." .... "Big data is everywhere now, but some big data isn't as big as it once was, relatively speaking. Tools like GraphChi will let many companies and startups solve all their graph-computing needs on a single machine. It's cost effective, and it drives innovation, too."

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Marissa Mayer, Kara Swisher

Image via CrunchBase

There is talk that Yahoo managed to announce Mayer's ascendancy to its top spot without Kara Swisher knowing about it beforehand. I think that claim itself establishes Swisher as a top tech journalist. What think you?

Swisher's 10 Questions

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