Fleet Week has officially kicked off here in New York City, which means a combustion of hormones has hit our shores; flocks of men who’ve been out at sea for weeks (months!?) are commingling with residents of what sometimes seems like a man-starved city. What better way to celebrate, as people who run a website full of stories, than sharing some of your tales of Fleet Week love connections!? If you want in, send us your stories of that time you met and fell for a sailor by filling out this Google form. Try and keep it somewhat clean, so we can publish it in its entirety, and let us know if you don’t want to remain anonymous. We’ll be gathering the best of the ... Continue reading →
Well, here’s a fun announcement. PandoDaily is very pleased to welcome a new special contributor: Jason Calacanis. Jason will be writing a regular (every couple of weeks) column, offering advice to a company that’s at a crossroads. Anyone who has attended Jason’s Launch conference, or read his blog or watched an episode of This Week In Startups will know exactly why we were so keen to add Jason’s voice to the site. He’s one of the most consistently entertaining (and, it has to be said, generous) voices in the tech ecosystem. The mentorship he gives at Launch — and before that, at TechCrunch 50 — has probably added countless millions of dollars of value to the companies involved, not to mention those in the audience. ... Continue reading →
The Tokyo Skytree looks magnificent. Four years in the making and topping out at 2,080ft, the giant observation tower and broadcasting mast opened on Tuesday as the world's second largest structure, with as many as 8,000 tourists expected on its first day. Only Dubai, that other great purveyor of very big things, can boast bigger – the vast Burj Khalifa tower would peer over the Skytree by almost 700ft, if they stood back to back.The pursuit of the huge is a long-standing tourism obsession. While the Skytree and the Burj have been executed with laudable style, other attempts at large-scale tourist-aimed projects demonstrate that bigger doesn't always mean better. Here are five reminders:The Ryugyong hotel, North Korea Photograph: Reuters Scheduled to be unveiled in time ... Continue reading →
David Ebersman (left), CFO of Facebook: regulators are now looking into whether disclosures made to key investors ahead of the IPO violated securities laws. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images It is three trading days after Facebook went public, and we now know that the IPO will live forever in the history books – just not in the way anyone had planned. Had Facebook openly set out to sabotage its own IPO, it could not have invented a better or more remarkable debacle: a tale of financial chaos fit for history books. Facebook stock has lost 20% of its value in only three days. In that alone, it is not remarkable. Large IPOs rarely perform well just after going public. Fund manager Och-Ziff, for instance, fell 24% ... Continue reading →
Back in November, I grappled with the fact that online display ads in general, and banner ads in particular, are clearly not working very well; my suggested alternative was for brand advertisers to embrace the power of the external link. That was one suggestion; there are many, many more. But what they all have in common is that they’re attempts to go beyond the ad, and to leverage the interactive power of the internet. Over at Tumblr, David Karp is being characteristically vague about what he’s offering to potential advertisers: all we know for the time being is that he “wants brands and marketers to use Tumblr as a way to tell stories that they can’t otherwise tell on other social networks”. Which sounds great, ... Continue reading →
Carr On Keen: Andrew Keen Talks About His New Book, Digital Vertigo Andrew Keen is back on the circuit, promoting his new book, Digital Vertigo. This bodes entertaining: last time Andrew was selling a book, he told Stephen Colbert that bloggers are worse than Nazis. Last week, he and I caught up for a video chat to discuss precisely how screwed the future is. Spoiler: pretty screwed. Continue reading →
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