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 […]

Mobile technology has been one of the biggest drivers of growth in the tech sector since the iPhone’s launch in 2007. But if Digi-Capital‘s predictions hold water, you ain’t seen nothing yet. According to the research and advisory firm’s latest Mobile Internet Investment Review, investors plowed mor

FishBrain, an app and social network for anglers, just caught its 700,000th user yesterday. It is also releasing a new version of its app today, which includes a “FishBrain Forecast” feature that uses a combination of algorithms and crowdsourcing to help you figure out, based on the weather, time of

I’m not sure which Facebook to believe: the Facebook of October, the Facebook of December, or the Facebook of now. In October 2014, Facebook issued a very clear statement saying that it’s never been the company’s policy to require legal names, but rather, to require people to use the names they go b

In October, Facebook issued a very clear statement saying that it’s never been the company’s policy to require legal names — but rather, to require people to use the names they go by in real life. “For Sister Rosa, that’s Sister Rosa. For Lil Miss Hot Mess, that’s Lil Miss Hot Mess,” a company spoke