Michael Wolff: The irony of the Facebook epoch is that old media covets its IPO billions, while new social media envies the old's content

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Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market. Here’s a look at the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world. The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it,  show all text

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"Advertisers are learning and experimenting" with Facebook's ad business, says Facebook itself. GM's move shows the downside of making it up as you go.

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

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Today, Flipboard introduces a major new addition: sound. Now you can enjoy all kinds of audio—music, podcasts, news segments, ephemera and more—while flipping through your favorite sections on Flipboard. You can start your auditory adventure by tapping on the red ribbon and exploring the new Audio category or by connecting to SoundCloud in the Accounts area. As soon as you press play, a music note will appear in the bottom left corner of Flipboard. Tap the note anytime to control your listening...  show all text

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In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there....  show all text

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Updated. Netflix clocked close to 42 billion API requests per day in January, according to the company’s director of engineering Daniel Jacobson, who revealed the number as part of a presentation he recently gave to the Paypal engineering team. In his slides, Jacobson pointed out that the number of API requests has grown 70-fold in just two years, from 600 million in January of 2010 to 41.7 billion in January of 2012. Providing an API that is resilient enough to handle these kinds of demands ...  show all text

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General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook after determining its paid ads had little impact on consumers. The news comes just days ahead of Facebook's IPO.

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The loss of $10 million in ad dollars does not represent a financial disaster for Facebook, but it is a public relations headache so close to the company’s initial stock offering this week.

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Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase couldn’t make the reason clearer.

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Editor’s note: This post was written by Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay. Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here. The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce). The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements, and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable se...  show all text

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There are a bunch of ways to explain away GM’s decision to stop spending ad dollars on Facebook. We’ll get to those. But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing. If you’...  show all text

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Four and a half years ago, I proudly joined the ranks of America's Finest News Source, a/k/a The Onion. For a comedian, tech geek and politics and news junkie, it was and remains an epic high in my life. Today, with a deep sense of nostalgia, I'm excited to move to the next chapter of that insane life having stepped down as Director of Digital to pursue more entrepreneurial ventures. It’s been an amazing ride. Acting as politics editor, I played a part in The Onion's 2008 "War For The White H...  show all text

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Mr. Sorkin said last year that he was inclined to adapt Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs for Sony. But no deal had been set until now.

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Peter Sciretta / /Film: Aaron Sorkin To Adapt ‘Steve Jobs’ for Sony  —  Last year we heard that Sony wanted Academy Award-winning The Social Network/The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography.  Sony had purchased the rights …

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Last year we heard that Sony wanted Academy Award-winning The Social Network/The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay for a Steve Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson‘s best-selling biography. Sony had purchased the rights in a $1 million deal made just days after the Apple co-founder’s passing on October 5th 2011. Last we heard, Sorkin was “strongly considering” the project. Since then, another movie from an independent producer based on Jobs’ life starring Ashton Kutcher has ...  show all text

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An FDA advisory panel asked the agency to let an HIV test be sold in retail stores so consumers don't have to go to a health facility to get tested for the virus.

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I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. So, the challenge: ...  show all text

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The only editorial mantra that ever made any sense to me comes from the Voice of San Diego new reporter guidelines: “Our bent: Reform. Things can always be better.” It’s been said that the role of journalism is to inform, but informing seems like a means, not an end, and I believe that a better world is  the ultimate goal for journalism. The ambitious idea of solution journalism is to concentrate reporting on what could be improved and how, not just what is wrong. There are a small number of pe...  show all text

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Can early-stage tech startups be financed the way that Disney might fund a Pixar film? We’re about to find out. New York’s betaworks is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to do a deal with design collective Fictive Kin. It’s pretty unusual because it resembles the way a producer might bankroll a movie or a game publisher might work with a developer. In this deal, betaworks is paying Fictive Kin, a design collective, a lump sum every year to create three or four concepts. Those concepts will be the ba...  show all text

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General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook after determining its paid ads had little impact on consumers. The news comes just days ahead of Facebook's IPO.

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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