MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Twice a year, the most influential incubator in the world, Y Combinator, holds a demo day for its most recent batch of companies. This year, the largest batch ever — 114 companies — is taking the stage for a few short minutes each, hoping to connect with an audience of an

If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you’ve got to be thinking about ways of expanding Facebook’s share of people’s time and attention. Now that the site reaches 65 percent of the American public, and almost 1.4 billion people worldwide, every month, growth can’t just come from getting more people on the plat

When tech-media company Gigaom abruptly shut down March 9, it didn’t look good for the company’s upcoming Structure Data conference, due to be held March 19-20 at New York’s Chelsea Piers. In fact, the conference was canceled, though you can still find it on the Gigaom events website. But some of th

When Apple announced its new MacBook last week, I was initially excited. A Retina display — with resolution of 2,304 by 1,440 pixels — and a hugely promising 9 hours of battery life with active Web use sounded like exactly what I wanted. Plus, it weighs only slightly more than an iPad, at just 2 […]

Take a look at this photo. Cute, right? That’s the profile photo for an ostensibly 25-year-old female named Ava on Tinder, a popular dating app. The profile has been popping up for Tinder users at SXSW this week. But after swiping right and making a connection with Ava, the conversation takes a stra

I recently met with an interesting startup from Israel called TL;DR that has changed the way I’m thinking about and using email. TL;DR stands for Too Long; Didn’t Read. It started as a quip used on Web forums and now occasionally stands in as a shorthand for “Here’s the summary of the long-winded th

I was on NBC Bay Area’s Sunday show “Press Here” a few weeks ago. This is a really fun show to do: It’s like a local version of “Meet the Press,” hosted by Scott McGrew. They bring in a couple local journalists and do a few short segments where we interview entrepreneurs about what they’re […]

For many of us, our lives are an endless feedback loop, punctuated by clicks and likes. Wake up. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Click on a few links. Post one of those links on Facebook with a funny comment. Brush teeth. Check to see if anyone liked your post on Facebook yet. Commute to work, checki

I’m going to try something new this week. I’ve been admiring emails by Om Malik, Alexis Madrigal, and Caitlin Dewey, who send daily or weekly lists of links to interesting things to read. (You should sign up for their newsletters — all three are wonderful, in very different ways.) And my occasional

OPINION: For about two hours today, all the Internet wanted to talk about was the FCC’s historic net neutrality decision. (They’re in favor of it.) Then, suddenly, all work stopped as the digerati focused their collective attention on two runaway llamas scampering around Phoenix. Short attention spa

OPINION:   There’s a deep shift in the way we communicate happening, and it’s about to turn media and marketing businesses upside-down. In short, the Web-based world is about to become secondary to the message-based world. Messaging apps like WhatsApp (now part of Facebook), WeChat, Line, Snapchat,

This week, Science published a noise map of the U.S., showing where the loudest and quietest places are. It reminded me of a tree map of the U.S. published a couple of years ago. If I were a maps geek, I’d try to combine these two maps so I could see at a glance the […]