It is getting late. After prodding doubtfully at a bright yellow jellylike substance that turns out to be mango salad dressing, the smartphones on the table begin to vibrate and beep once more. “Venture capital is a regret business,” concludes one of China’s most successful investors. And with that he finally turns his attention back to the gyrations of the market.
Category: Tech
Google: Seeking Alpha-bet
Google’s new parent company, Alphabet:
For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.
HTC Trading Below Cash on Hand
From Daring Fireball :
Things move fast in this industry. In 2009 HTC was responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile handset sales. Two years later they were flying high as the best Android handset maker. Now their entire company is worthless.
Bad Ads On Websites
René Ritchie is right to compare ad-exchanges to black-boxes, you never know what you’ll get :
We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.
When bad ads appear, we report them and ask that they be disabled. Since different people in different geographies see different ads, it can be a challenge to identify them, and it can take a while to get them pulled. It’s a horrible process for everyone involved.
It’s so bad, our tech team has been exploring their own “bad ads” extension that would identify any resource-heavy ads that violate our policies, and provide us with better information so the ad network can more easily find and kill them. And yes, we’re well aware of how insane that sounds.
The Day the Computers Betrayed Us
“What we can say is that when things work in new ways, they break in new ways,” Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic after a glitch waylaid the NASDAQ stock exchange for three hours in 2013, causing a panic.
